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6/01 cJCIRC/DaleDue.p65-p.15

VOICE AND VOICELESSNESS: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL
CHARACTERIZATIONS OF WOMEN
IN THE NOVELS OF
PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS AND JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
By

Regina Vertell Jones

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2003

ABSTRACT
VOICE AND VOICELESSNESS: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL
CHARACTERIZATIONS OF WOMEN
IN THE NOVELS OF
PAULINE ELIZABETH HOPKINS AND JESSIE REDMON FAUSET
BY

Regina Vertell Jones

This dissertation focuses on the voices of African-American women during
the antebellum period of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century in
United States literature. The voices of many nineteenth century narrative women
and African American women writers in the early twentieth century have been
misrepresented or ignored by many literary critics. In an effort to recover the
voices of some of the nineteenth century African American women subjects and
writers, this dissertation offers a cursory history of responses to the voices of
Negro women from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Such background
demonstrates the violence and misunderstandings linked to the voices of
laboring Negro women. Consequently, the second chapter focuses on the
contradictory meaning of “sass.” Some listeners referred to the women as sassy
to dismiss or ignore what the women were saying. However, their sassy
articulations characterized the sociopolitical environment in which they existed.
Furthermore in the narratives seven nineteenth-century women experience their
need to encourage and Share their experiences with others.

The narrative women paved the way for novel writers such as Pauline

Elizabeth Hopkins and Jessie Redmon Fauset to construct Negro women

characters in the likeness and variety of Black women. Both writers construct
sassy female characters who resist stereotypes and challenge the sociopolitical
environments that confront them. Chapter three is primarily concerned with the
mixture of Plantation Creole and Standard English to well-rounded and
stereotypical challenging female characterizations in Hopkins” serialized novel
Hggar‘s Daughter. Chapter four examines Jesse Redmon Fauset’s presentation
of working—class and middle-class women in her novels along with her use of
dialogue in Black English, Standard English, and slang.

This study concludes with the understanding that many women with
limited resources made themselves heard over the sirens of oppression and

denunciation blaring from a ruling class.

Copyright by
Regina Vertell Jones
2003

Dedication

To the memory of my parents
Clarence Neal and Haroldine Vertell Tillman Jones
and

Ms. (Wanda) Hogg

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have many individuals to thank for their years of prayer, support,
understanding and tolerance as I moved toward completion of this
dissertation. Praise God and thank the ancestors that this phase is
completed. To Dr. Geneva Smitherrnan (“Dr.G”) thank you for agreeing to
tolerate my questions, promptly answering my emails, heading the committee
and making yourself available. Thank you for your many thoughtful
considerations. Dr. Christine Levecq I wish you all the best and appreciate
your encouragement, responses and questions. I truly appreciate all the time
you spent reading, critiquing and understanding. Your emails always uplift.
Dr. Troutrnan you are a patient and giving individual who graciously
participated and worked to help me while simultaneously committed to many
other activities. Our independent study sessions introduced me to the
engaging works of many scholars. Dr. Eldredge you are selfless in your
contributions and availability to your students. I am thankful that I was among
the many. I truly appreciate the unflinching effort, input and advice provided
by Dr. Bill E. Lawson and Dr. Gregory Thomas on such short notice. A
Special thanks to Dr. Gloria Randle who started me on this project.

The Detroit contingent was also invaluable to me in the completion of
this work: Bernadette Charles thanks for etiquette lessons, email terminology
and encouraging words. Thank you for the years of helpful and hopeful

words and prayers. I aspire to be as charming as you. Aunt Gertrude Tinsley

thanks for including me in your prayers—“I’m appreciative and always standin
in the needof.” Ava TInsIey for being with me in times of need and entrusted
to make the life or death decision you get the first piece of birthday cake.
Sharon Simpson and Mark Tinsley for taking the time to proofread and keep
me afloat eternal gratitude. Debra TInSIey you make me know that “all work
and no play” limits. Marquella Tinsley smile more, thanks for painting and
best always. Jackie and Johnny Moore books are handy but chocolate is
dandy! Duane Belin for being my conscious, advising and coming to my aid
when I’m confused and cleaning up when I’m helpless. Carol Troupe no one
could ask for a better sister. Thank you for believing me worthy of sharing
whatever you got. Ain’t nothin better than friends and family. Halbert Tillman
Jr., thank you for your persistence, continued laughs, and remembering the
past, always. You’ve all taught me more than you know.

And for always being there for me from a long way away: Ana S.
Robinson, Big Easy; Joanne T. Gabay, Georgia; Sylvia Cunningham, North
Carolina; Veronika Tillman, San Francisco; Lea WInfrey, Bridgeport, Ml;
Marchanda Smith (always lookin out, you are so sweet, thanks for offering me
a place to stay in East Lansing), my buddies at MSU and the faculty and staff
in the Departments of English and History.

Praise the Lord for each and every individual who has tolerated, been
patient with, or said a prayer for me along this path—professors, peers,
students, family and friends I’m thankful.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Overview of Black Women's Voice

And Writing Tradition in the US

Voices Defined

Public Spaces and Literary Conventions

Testifyin Theory Represents an Angle of VISion
Chapter 2: “Sass” Claimed Terrain of Narrative Women
Chapter 3: Pauline Hopkins’ Speakerly Heroines

Chapter 4: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Novels, Critics and
Surviving Women

Conclusion: Last Word

Bibliography

viii

13
22
42
71

108

1 53
200
206

Seven Women’s Narratives

Seven Women’s Narratives

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1
Table 2

ix

77

78

Introduction

OVERVIEW OF BLACK WOMEN’S
VOICE AND WRITING TRADITION IN THE US.

Producing intellectual work is generally not attributed to Black women artists and
political activists. Such women are typically thought of as nonintellectual and
nonscholarly, classifications that create a false dichotomy between scholarship
and activism, between thinking and doing. Examining the ideas and actions of
these extended groups reveals a world in which behavior is a statement of
philosophy and in which a vibrant, both/and, scholar/activist tradition remains
intact.

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thg_ught

At the Charleston marketplace, during the colonial period, slaves could
buy or sell on behalf of their masters, thanks to the Negro Act of 1740.
Interestingly, “most of the marketeers were slave women. . .AS market traders
these women took on the roles traditionally allocated to women in West African,
Caribbean, and most other preindustrial societies” (Olwell 99-100). In 1772, the
market women were described as “’insolent,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘notorious,’ and
‘impudent.’... When complainants described the resistance of market women
they referred mostly to verbal aggression and linguistic ‘impudence.’ Ridicule,
bluster, and wit were the market women’s strongest weapons” (Olwell 104).
Robert Olwell believes that “a black man would hardly have been permitted to
make such an overt challenge to the authority of the slave society.
Consequently, only the continuing subordination of the slave marketeers as
women may have allowed them momentarily to overcome the limitations imposed

by slavery and race“ (104). Olwell seems to suggest that the women’s verbal

aggression was tolerated because of their gender implying that no penalties
resulted from talking back.

Verbal skills mixed with the ability to trade had allowed West African
women to assume “almost complete control of the city’s [Charles Town, South
Carolina] food supply. In 1686, a law was passed forbidding the purchase of
goods from slaves. It had little effect" (Hine & Thompson 47). In an attempt to
prevent the dominance of enterprising enslaved Black women, an official
marketplace was set up in 1739. “That didn’t work either. In fact, none of the
many attempts to take control of the marketplace out of the hands of enslaved
black women worked” (Hine 8. Thompson 47). The haggling Black marketwomen
disregarded the law, threats and a new marketplace and continued to talk and
sell.

At the end of Reconstruction in the United States, and in the face of
oppression and terrorism, Negro women continued to employ assertive
communication. In her important study, Labor of Love, LaQr 9f Sam,
Jacqueline Jones finds that fifteen years after the Civil War, in relation to the
South, both Northern and foreign observers “conveyed the distinct impression
that black women were particulariy outspoken and aggressive (by implication
relative to black men) in their willingness to confront white authority figures” (70).
Jones maintains that defenders of the cult of true womanhood

...could not help but be struck by black women who openly
challenged conventional standards of female submissiveness.

Fmedwomen were described as “growling,” “impertinent,”

“impudent,” “vulgar” persons who “spoke up bold as brass” and,
with their “loud and boisterous talking,” demanded fair treatment for
“we people [left] way back.” In the process of ridiculing these
women, northemers often indirectly revealed their ambivalent
attitudes toward black men. Apparently an aggressive woman
existed outside the realm of “natural,” male-female relationships;
her own truculence must be counterbalanwd by the weakness of
her husband, brother, or father. But ironically in such cases, male
relatives were often perceived to be much more “reasonable” (that
is prone to accept the white man’s point of view) than their
vehement womenfolk (70).

Such speaking women faced fatal or nearly deadly punishment for their fluent

acts of resistance.

Women who questioned, disagreed, labored and earned wages outside of
their homes were beyond the ideologies of true womanhood or rather the
VIctorian notion of the cult of true womanhood. True women were middle to
upper-class, Euro Americans concerned with the proper operation of their homes
and the needs of those therein. To further enhance their domestic
preoccupation, true women were pure, pious and submissive to their husbands.
True women, it seems, were Silent and obedient to what they were told to do
when it came to politics and acts occurring in the public realm. The duties of true
women were confined to the domestic sphere where they were generally alMd

to make decisions.

Jones reports the consequences to toiling black women for their
objections about ”the amount and quality of work performed...and disagreements
over the compensation due her...” (71). These women were dragged, beaten,
choked and susceptible to multiple corporeal punishments for any perceived
offenses. Jones finds that “the viciousness aimed at freedwomen was
particularly significant as a phenomenon in American women’s history. Unlike
the cold-blooded slaughter of Native Americans, these were personal attacks,
carried out face-to-face by men who knew their victims and their families” (72).
These outspoken Negro working-class women, assailed by white men in the
South during the 1880s, are reminiscent of the market women’s voices in the
eighteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina marketplace. Enslaved and
working-class women used direct verbal resistance to articulate their oppressions
and requirements; they spoke fully aware of the numerous possible forms of
punishment they could receive.

My opening epigraph, the voices of these market women and the
beleaguered post-Reconstruction laborers suggest a consciousness and an
activism that trespass ideal genteel feminine behavior when one looked from the
position of the ruling class. As a sociopolitical act the communication of that
consciousness, embodied in the use of voice on the part of varying social classes
of women, is part of some women’s agenda to confront the anti-revolutionary
activity of silencing the voices of women. Yet, African American women
speaking through the reality of racism, sexism and classism in the United States

find that our voices, if heard, in the ruling culture are filtered through social,

historical and cultural channels that can cause a disruption in the message. This
process leads to a silencing of our voices—voicelessness. Nevertheless, African
American women continue to speak while understanding that others critique our
transmissions as loud, senseless and vulgar—the twentieth-first century
equivalent to “insolent, abusive, notorious, and impudent.” Such public
dismissives work to deflect the intentions, motives and messages of less
politically powerful speaking women by those in power.

Karla Holloway warns “If black women behave as if race and sex are
peripheral rather than central, we participate in these [public] encounters at
considerable risk” (1995 29). At an academic (Women’s Studies) conference,
addressing both her anger and racism, Audre Lorde recalled that, “...a white
woman [said], ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear
you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message
that her life may change?” (125). Professor Lani Guinier was nominated, by
then President Clinton, as deputy attorney general for civil rights in 1993. Guinier
was persuaded to keep silent during the public lynching of her writings and
consequently her person. The mainstream news media saw fit to move beyond
her legal writing to a discussion of her name and appearance—“strange name,
strange hair, strange ideas—she’s history” (Baer 38). Her gender and
appearance was made an issue. Former US. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’
voice “retains some of the nonstandard features that identify her region and

ethnicity" (Holloway, ngeg of ngduct 94). Holloway finds:

...when Elders speculated that legalization of some drugs could
lead to a reduction in urban crime, Reagan-era Secretary of
Education William Bennett felt no compunction calling her ”nutty” on
a C-SPAN call-in Show. During the same interview ...Bennett
easily acknowledged that conservative pundit Vlfilliam Buckley had
expressed the same sentiment as Elders’s. Buckley was merely
“mistaken” in his view, according to Bennett. Elders he repeated,
was ”Simply nutty” (95).
Bennett’s bias against the speaking Elders is clear. According to Holloway,
Elder’s dialect ”continues to make her vulnerable to the public abuse that
Bennett’s offensive comment typifies” (95). Former President Clinton fired Elders
for a statement she did not make “that schools should teach children how to
masturbate” (95). The public manipulation and judgment of Guinier and Elders
demonstrate that Silencing a woman includes more than just the act of preventing
her from speaking. African American women who are in public view must
remember their gender and race because the media, it appears, will make it an
issue. Like voice, silencing includes myriad techniques and includes a range of
practices.

Ironically, 5.53M magazine, originally published over twenty-five years
ago for ”Today’s Black Woman,” in 1999 counsels African American women that
”he’ll be putty in your hands—if you’ll just watch your mouth” (McIntosh 135).
The essay begins with a photograph of a Speaking obviously black woman’s lips;

it includes mouth, teeth and tongue. Her mouth and lips are so enlarged they

cannot be contained within the width of the page. Between her parted, purple
painted lips, above her tongue and just below her top front sparkling white teeth
are where the title has suggestively been placed, “How To Talk To A Black Man,”
in all capital letters. It appears she could unconsciously yet quite easily consume
the title if She chose. The author, Claire McIntosh, asserts “There’s an art and a
science in how to talk to a Black man, one that respects his significance in a
world that often doesn’t” (136). One would then assume Black women lived in a
world where they are respected. Ostensibly, in intimate heterosexual
relationships, beyond public dialogue, Black women’s voices still provoke
negative responses. McIntosh, a woman, sees nothing wrong in her public
participation for the oppression of her gender when she suggests that African
American women, once engaged in intimate relationships with African American
men, should soflen our verbal intercourse.

According to McIntosh’S expert, (Dr. Ronn Elmore), ‘too many sisters
suffer from the Sapphire Syndrome” (136). “Sapphire. She’s an unfortunate and
much-despised stereotype—a swivel-necked, hip-holding, eye rolling, teeth-
sucking, acid-tongued caricature of the women who love Black men,” explains
Elmore (136). Who exactly despises the woman he describes? He fuels an
acknowledged stereotype of Black women with a supposed mental ailment,
undoubbdly, unique to some Black women. To clarify, a confused reader is
informed that “any tendency to dog, diss or deflate your man as you attempt to
get your point across is a Sign you may be afflicted” (136). AS a woman and
probably a woman of African American descent, family psychologist Brenda

Wade is used to help legitimize, soften and reinforce her male colleague’s point.
She finds, “Black women adapted this behavior as a way of coping with
suppressed anger during our centuries of oppression” (136). Rather than using
the term Sapphire, She conjures up a description of such verbal women as “evil.”
Evil sisters, She points out, “should take time out for self-care and seek therapy”
(136). Neither expert, it seems, believes that “Sapphires” or evil sisters are
acting in their own best interests. Furthermore, and after centuries of
oppression, some mental health care professionals advise evil sisters to repress
their voices—not a novel concept. For example, “Find ways to Show your
approval of him as a person even while you disapprove of his behavior, advises
Dr. Grace Cornish, a New York City social psychologist” (136). And, “Elmore
strongly advises that you choose the right time and place for criticism: ‘Praise in
public; protest in private’” (136). Although the experts, in McIntosh’s essay,
strongly disapprove and criticize the articulations of some African American
women, interestingly, they do not indicate that the vocal women’s observations
were incorrect. Yet in intimate, heterosexual relationships the voices of African
American women describing their displeasure are viewed as hostile acts that
have the power to topple the psyche of healthy African American males.
According to the essay, “we’ve [African American women] learned to use words
as a shield, as a sword and as a way to take care of business” (136). Vocal
African American women continue to be labeled and censured for expressing our

dissatisfaction with personal and professional relationships.

Communications Scholar Marsha Stanback’s labeling of African American
women (in “Language and Black Women’s Place“) contrast with McIntosh’s
essay. Instead of referring to some middle-class African American women as
evil or classifying our communication style “Sapphire Syndrome,” Stanback refers
to it as “smart talk.” She agrees that African American women are verbally
assertive as a result of the way we are socialized. Centuries of socialization,
seemingly, reinforces an African American women’s communication style that
many find intimidating and aggressive. One of the reasons for assertive
communication style is the ongoing struggles which Black women face
(T routman 215).

There are differences in the ways that Black women communicate.
Marsha Houston’s article, “When Black Women Talk with White Women,” states
that “researchers have noted the high value African American women place on
talk that is forthright, sincere, and authentic” (136). Linguist Denise Troutman
points out “research conducted to date has not fully considered the impact of
gender and race on language when the women are African Americans,” she
does, however, find that one way to view this intersection “is by examining two
cultural habits, or ‘carryovers’: the code of feminine politeness and agonistic
behavior” (213). Troutman points out the crucial difference in the code of
feminine politeness between African American and Euro American women. In
general, for Euro American women from the eighteenth century fonrvard the code
of feminine politeness, or rather the cult of true womanhood, affected their

communication styles. Troutman determines:

dictates concealing true feelings and thoughts from those in
power, in this sense, politeness remains uppermost in interactions
between European Americans. In verbal interactions, politeness
remains a central modus vivendi, because European American
women have been socialized to wait their turn to speak and not to
interrupt violate another person’s turn (214).

Politeness norms for African American women, according to Troutman, differ.
African American women appear to learn, at some point, how to
tread the nebulous line between being polite and being assertive.
Although the reproof, or its equivalent, “Don’t be so womanish” is
heard in many African American households, when African
American females reach an appropriate age, they are expected to
take on “womanish” ways. One mark of attaining womanhood is
knowing when to be polite and when to assert oneself. This aspect
of African American women’s code of feminine politeness is passed
on verbally or learned through nonverbal behavior (214).

Alice Walker also acknowledges a code of Black women decorum and verbal

inheritance in her first definition of black feminist that she identifies as Womanist.

Walker defines womanist as:
from the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you
acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to
outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to

know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one.

10

Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up.
Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to
be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious (xi).
However, there are some Black women who, when speaking to one another
sound extremely aggressive and threatening to outsiders; yet, they are merely
enjoying a verbal exchange. I will point out aspects of feminine politeness as I
consider the voices of women in this dissertation.

Many women of color understand their oppressions and have experienced
abuses and public bigotry; therefore, when we speak publicly and transgress the
ruling culture’s ideology it is understood that we risk punishment or ostracism of
some sort. Like the market women, many African American women penetrate
public dialogue though self-assertion.

Until recently, I have rarely come across literary criticism that seriously
addresses the role and influence of enslaved or working-class Negro women’s
voices in United States literature authored by Negro American women in the
nineteenth century or during the Harlem Renaissance. Often, the turn of the
century interested, concerned, and opinionated voices of the enslaved or
wage/laboring black women characters (nineteenth to twentieth century) are
minimized or ignored by critics at the time of publication and for years to follow.
This study is concerned with the act of voice, in works by African American
women writers, performed by their female characters, primarily their working-
class characters, and the subsequent critical voicelessness of Hopkins and

Fauset and their female characters. Working-class women are characters who

11

earn money to support themselves or their families. Voicelessness is used to
describe the critical neglect that Hopkins and Fauset’s works have received until
quite recently. More directly, this dissertation will focus on characters in the
novels of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Much criticism
that underprivileges the voices of black working-class women either dismisses
them as minstrel folly, plainly ignores them or disdains their work as novels of
manners or passing. The market women and the post-Reconstruction laborers
exhibited behavior that appeared to be shocking, brazen, willful and independent
to a ruling culture and as a result they were manipulated in the media, labeled,
beaten and fomd to the rear. As Olwell points out the market women as
traders, for example, performed duties expected of Black women in West Africa
and Caribbean societies. Taking over the market and controlling the prices was
characteristic behavior for the market women. Although they were certainly
aware of how others viewed them, I doubt that the market women considered
themselves loose, idle and disorderly (as they were identified). Likewise,
keeping in mind that the nineteenth century narrative women were mindful that
the ruling culture held them in low esteem and therefore did not value their
voices; I want to feature their voices, and allow them to resonate with the force
and meaning characteristic of Negro women. This means that the women talked
back, talked with, answered and responded to the ruling culture and to one

another invoking an African and consequently African American oral aesthetic.

12

Voices Defined

Voice is defined as any articulation, quotation or related gesture attributed,
specifically, to a speaking African American woman, character, narrator or
authorial utterance. In chapter two voice is an action that refers to nineteenth
century narrative women, writers and female characters. By the nineteenth
century Black women in this country had dealt with complex forms of
dehumanization, oppression, domination and other forms of violence.
Consequently, their public response to such terrorism was just as elaborate. The
ruling culture made space for the voices of former or run-away slaves in the
genre of escaped slave narratives and related literature. They found the
narratives to be a safe and controlled place to read about the barbarity of
Southerners, for example. Nevertheless, after the domination and humiliation of
Slavery it appears that the nineteenth century narrative women were more prone
to directly articulate their history and emotions concerning their lives in bondage.
They wanted their stories told for various reasons. This also accounts for how
direct, in some cases, they allowed their voices to become. Interestingly, when
nineteenth-century Black women are perceived as articulating an authoritative
stance, their voices are characterized as sassy, saucy and unladylike by the
ruling culture in the text, and are often ignored by literary critics. During the
nineteenth century their sassy manner was met with violence of some sort.
Sass, which will be elaborated on in chapter two, is usually a direct verbal and
physically punctuated response to one in close emotional proximity. The voices

of African American women, as described in this paper, illuminate issues of

13

power in the United States from the antebellum period to the early twentieth
century. Their stories involve sociopolitical issues. However, a twenty-first
century reading of the narrative women suggests they were not as discreet as
their literary offspring became. Further the narrative women, I believe, shared
stories of which their mothers would approve. (Their mothers were usually
included in their narratives.) Chapter two points out and describes the influence
of resistant women’s voices in nineteenth century Black women’s narratives. It
appears that mothers or maternal figures had a significant amount of influence on
the narrative women. I suspect tradition and the immediate community dictated
that if given the opportunity there were particular stories that the larger society
should be told. In other words, they revealed the hardships and degradations of
Slavery tempered by the importance of family (which extended beyond a
biological boundary). However, it is understood that the ruling culture of
nineteenth century North America would not be interested in the voices of Black
women articulating their sociopolitical issues that challenged or misrepresented
ruling class ideology. During their bondage the narrative women were subject to
extended portions of their lives under close surveillance while simultaneously
working to resist oppressions in the face of danger. I use the term Negro or
Black interchangeably as proper nouns at times because they were the
descriptive terminology used by a group of people to describe themselves.
When Hopkins and Fauset began to publish fiction they were aware of the
sociopolitical climate, attitudes toward Negroes and women. They knew that

their work required a publisher if it was to be read by or read to a larger

14

population. Publishers served as one of the gatekeepers for the ruling culture.
Writers could be kept under surveillance via their work or at least publishers
could make certain writers’ work fit the publishers’ ideologies. To preserve the
moral conscience of “true women” publishers participated in reinforcing the code
of true womanhood. Giddings found:
As the women’s magazines and romance literature of the period
suggested, madness, sometimes death, and always tragedy were
the fate of a woman who could not fulfill the “attributes” of true
womanhood. To be lacking in any of those qualities meant a
woman was unnatural, unfeminine, and thus a species of a
different—if not lower—female order (48).
Hopkins and Fauset were clearly concerned with confronting issues of race, sex,
women’s rights, and economic class (to identify just a few points) propositions
that were in conflict with what the masculine ruling culture wanhd discussed.
Furthermore, when it came to issues concerning Negro women, they were
encouraged to focus on issues of racism, femininity or middle-class standards
rather than women’s issues. “Early in his public career even W. E. B. Du Bois,
like [John] Hope, put femininity above feminism” (White, M 67). With
such opposition Hopkins and Fauset, therefore, had to mask their sociopolitical
messages. In Hopkins’ fiction the middle to upper-class characters are not
necessarily who they seem to be. This is discussed in chapter three. She invites
a reader to recall history and decloak or unmask the sociopolitical issues
surrounding the mystery of who the individual character actually is or what slhe

15

are intended to represent. Hopkins makes it clear that the middle- to upper-class
characters are in disguise. Likewise, she constructs her enslaved and working
class characters with less ornamentation or genteel behavior and more vocal
range. Enslaved or working-class Black folk become hidden in plain view or
stereotyped, for those who accept banal characterizations. Consequently, they
are considered by some critics as less complex, more comic and thus less apt to
make complex sociopolitical statements, if they are acknowledged at all. In
Hagar’s Daughter, for example, the enslaved and working class Blacks speak
Plantation Creole which seems to be a cue for some readers and critics that its
speakers are comedic or worthy to be ignored. Moreover, I suspect that both
Hopkins and Fauset understood the mockery of Black dialect and used
Plantation Creole or Black English speaking characters to make statements that
had nothing to do with comedy. In Moorings & Metaphors Karla Holloway
observes that “in societies that are both racist and sexist, bias is a distinction of
culture as well as gender” (sic 20). Certainly those who have a respect for
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) could appreciate its’ adapted use.
In addition, it has become the custom in this country to mock and ridicule
speakers of AAVE.
The use that could be made of a rendering of Black English was
familiar enough to northemers; such “humor” had been ubiquitous
in the almanaes and the newspapers of the 1790s. But from the
early years of the nineteenth century, when more African

northemers were achieving their freedom, the character of both the

16

humor and the black dialect took on a harder, nastier edge. This
change is most easily seen in the jokes and broadsides concerning
“Bobalition” (abolition), a brand of humor which was associated
most closely with Boston, and which constitutes perhaps the
earliest extensive and regular seam of black caricature in America
(Sm 108).
Consequently, such speakers were perceived as unintelligent or nonscholarly by
those who believed that the nineteenth century Boston, for example, and related
versions of standard English were the only utterances civilized Individuals
employed. Therefore, one of the best places to deliver an important message or
make a rebellious statement in fiction to a Negro and female audience could be
with a Plantation Creole speaking Negro character. This simultaneously exposes
the partiality of readers who automatically ignore such characters or view them
as comic.
As mentioned, Hopkins was literary editor at W.
“Her writing for the journal included historical and social literature, asserted the
bonds of racial brotherhood, and used biography, history, adventure and tradition
in an attempt to render into words the unique experience of a people” (Carby
123). The Colored when Magazine was unique because it was a cooperative
publishing venture, its target audience “American citizens of color,” was “an
attempt to define as well as create the boundaries of a black magazine-reading
public and was therefore a pioneer of the contemporary black magazine market”
(Carby 125). Hopkins (editor of the Women’s Department) saw to it that Negro

17

women were represenwd in the magazine. Although her writings were not
limited to fiction She believed that through fictions ability to entertain readers
would discover the historical, cultural and political significance of Negro life. Her
1902, 1903 serialize novel, MM, reminds readers that there were a line
of ruling women in Cush known as “Candaces”—“but the title of Candace was
applied to just four—some say five—of these queen-mothers who became
independent rulers” (Williams and Finch 20). Almost one hundred years since
the publication of Of One Big and many folk are still generally unaware of that
fact today. Her melancholy protagonist Reuel Briggs studies super natural
phenomenon, escapes unknowingly consummating an incestuous relationship
and literally discovers his Ethiopian roots and finds his family. Though this is all
most fascinating I wonder why this novel escaped critical attention until recently.
Hopkins voice, like Wilson, is direct. Her fictional women challenge ruling
culture’s convenh'ons of womanhood and her narrative voice deliberately
intervenes to make certain a reader understands the intention of particular
scenes. There are extensive topics and themes that Hopkins incorporates
probably because her goal was to educate. Moreover, as a novelist she
probably enjoyed less restrictive interference since her publisher was the Colored
Co—operative Publishing Company.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was an important novelist, essayist and poet
during the 1920s and 19308. Between 1919 and 1926 Fauset was literary editor
for The Cm’ E magazine. She also edited (1920-1921) its children’s magazine,
the Mk. As a literary editor, Fauset was instrumental in publishing

18

the works of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Anne Spencer and Jean Toomer.
She discovered one of the most well-known and accomplished poets of the
twentieth century, Langston Hughes. In his autobiography, The B'g fie, Hughes
describes Fauset, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke as the three “midwives”
of the Harlem Renaissance (218). Like Hopkins, Fauset too was well connected
in the literary realm.

Harlem Renaissance chronicler David L. Lewis describes the dinner, given
for Fauset in M1211 Heglem Was In Vegue, as “the dress rehearsal of what was
soon to be known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’” (90). The legendary Civic Club
Dinner (21 March 1924) was organized by Charles S. Johnson for Fauset’s newly
published book There le Cmmeion. Carl Van Doren, m magazine editor,
spoke on “The Younger Generation of Negro Writers.” Lewis writes, Van Doren
advised a “happy balance between rage and complacency” (93). Van Doren
concluded “What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color,
music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are
not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are”
(93—94). Fauset's publisher Horace Liverlght (Boni 8. Liveright) challenged “his
competitors to test the waters of black talent with a few publishing contracts”
(Lewis 94). Walter White, assistant secretary of the NAACP, urged “new writers
to put aside racial stereotypes” (Lewis 94). The new generation of Negro writers
were advised to pen cheerful conservative works befitting their experiences yet
they should reflect assimilation while being cautious of what they wrote, to insure

the publication of a few more Negro writers.

19

Although she met the suggested criteria the speakers espoused, Fauset
faced difficulties finding a publisher for her first novel, There IS Qonfigion.
“Publishers rejected her first manuscript because ‘it contains no description of
Harlem dives, no race riot, no picturesque, abject poverty’” according to Hiroko
Sato (69). Sato charges such rejection indicates the real attitude of publishers to
Negro writers. He, however, affirms that “the publication of her first novel was a
memorable event in the Negro literary world” (67). W. E. B. Du Bois, Fauset’s
mentor, reported in the Qgieie magazine that There IS Confusion “is not merely a
race story told from the inside, but a cross section of the race life higher up the
social pyramid and further from the base-line of the peasant and the soil than is
usually taken” (162). Likewise, William Stanley Braithwaite reasons “She has
taken a class within the race, given it an established social standing, tradition,
culture, and shown that its predilections are very much like those of any civilized
group of human beings” (210). Du Bois and Braithwaite viewed Fauset’s M
lemme as an urban novel of manners and encouraged its sale.

David Lewis contends “Sales were to be good, and reviews in the white
press were generally favorable, although Fauset was mistakenly described as
the first female writer of fiction of her race” (123). However, Mary White Overton,
in her syndicated column “Book Chat,” questioned “if this colored world that Miss
Fauset draws’ really existed” (Lewis 124). MS. Ovington echoes the
apprehensions of a rejecting publisher who charged, “White readers just don’t
expect Negroes to be like this” (Lewis 124). Over fifty years later, Lewis

proclaims,

20

Yet the world of There Is Confusion was real. A few hundred
families strong, living (like the author’s own ancient Philadelphia
family) on the margin of affluence in a style of worn fustian gentility,
clinging to pedigree, color, and gracious manners, Fauset‘s
characters have the straltened pretensions of aristocrats after a
revolution (124).
Fauset is applauded, ostensibly, by some of the Negro intelligentsia for writing
acceptable, affluent, polite Negro characters who do not riot or gamble. Yet,
Fauset’s novels are about different classes of women and a deconstruction of
feminine politeness. Lewis is mistaken when he likens her characters to her own
“ancient Philadelphia family.” The last few paragraphs have described Fauset’s
first publication and its aftermath but little is heard of Fauset’s voice or a sense of
what she actually wrote about in the novel other than affluent Negroes. Like
Hopkins, Fauset is concerned with history. Fauset is perceived as so gracious
and Iadylike that many critics neglected to see her humor and focus on the plight
of middle-class Negro women. Chapter four will focus on Fauset’s female
constructs, related protests and other voices in her novels.

When Celia allows her natural voice to emerge, in Alice Walker’s
renowned novel 1112 Color Pugele, she is provoked to curse Mr. Mr. laughs. He
disregards her words, offering the following reason: “Who you think you is? he
say. You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a
woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (187). Though this is a more

contemporary novel, Mr.’s remarks embody what happened when some African

21

American women characters spoke in literature, they were perceived as funny or
ignored as “nothing at all.”
I’m pore, I’m black, I maybe ugly and can’t cook,
a voice say to everything listening.

But I’m here.
Alice Walker The Qelor Pgmg

Public Spaces and Literary Conventions—Charged Voices of Negro Women

Through voice and language the women emphasize the importance of
history, identity, culture, the repression of women, the influence of racism, sexism
and classism, and an aesthetic of African American womanhood in the United
States. A chronicle of the many voices of Black women is another example of
how power is exerted from the bottom up. Early African and African American
women’s literature was easily overlooked. To be heard the women in some
manner had to assert themselves. I think it is important to keep in mind what
Troutman identified as feminine politeness to compare it to what the women
faced and how they voiced their positions in a few well documented
circumstances.

Blyden Jackson marks the beginning of African American literature with
the poem “Bars Fight” (29). Composed in 1746, “Bars Fight,” a poem by a West
African teenager (Lucy Terry) enslaved in Rhode Island, was published in “1855
in H'Iejery ef Wgtem Maegehugtts by Josiah Gilbert Holland” (Hine and
Thompson 2). The poem commemorated the events of an Indian attack in
Deerfield. Most scholars agree that one cannot tell Terry’s nationality from the

poem. Terry is characterized, by Jackson, as “a person of considerable vitality,

22

ability, and forcefulness of character,” was “widely esteemed in Deerfield as a
storyteller of parts” (30, 31). She believed in the American system and relied on
her voice to articulate wrongs. When one of her sons was refused admission to
Williams College on racial grounds Terry made “a three hour verbal appeal”
quoting law and the Bible (Jackson 32). Though unsuccessful in gaining
admittance for her son, she was victorious in her argument before the United
States Supreme Court after one of her neighbors tried to claim her family’s land.
“Justice Chase said that Lucy made a better argument than he had heard from
any lawyer at the Vermont bar” (Hine and Thompson 3). Terry is remembered in
the area for being witty, shrewd and attracting boys to her house “to hear her
talk” (Hine and Thompson 1). It appears she believed in talking up for what she
believed and letting others know her stand on issues. By the way, if ”Bar’s
Fight” signals the beginning of African American literature it should be stated that
African American literature begins with the voice of an African women.

When acknowledged, the public voices of African American women in the
United States have been greeted with close scrutiny. Charles W. Akers finds that
“eariy in her teens she [Phillis Wheatley] began writing poetry for her own
amusement, but by New England standards her verse proved too good to escape
notice” (1). Wheatley’s 1773 volume, WW
Merel, is prefaced by what appears to be one of the most imposing interviews
visited upon a teenage or an adult poet. In a note to the public the leaders of the
colony assure readers that “Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years

Since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been,

23

and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this
Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought
qualified to write them” (np). Her eighteen examiners included the governor and
lieutenant-govemor of Massachusetts, judges, attorneys and reverends all of
whom are listed in the preface of her colbction.

Sojourner anth is said to have had a “powerful speaking manner and
independent spirit” as a result “she was often accused of being a man dressed in
women’s clothing” (Fish 19). To dispel the accusations, in Silver Lake, Indiana
“she exposed her bared breasts to the audience which had accused her"1 (Fish
20). Painter points out that Truth “responded with a tongue-lashing that shamed
her questioners and impugned their manhood” (139). As Truth authenticabd her
womanliness for the coed Silver Lake audience she sassed some members by
inviting them to suckle (Painter 139). Truth demonstrated that it would take more
than labeling and taunting to make her voiceless.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper raised questions concerning her femininity
as a writer, speaker and abolitionist during the mid-nineteenth century. Frances
Smith Foster makes clear that during “the mid-nineteenth century professional
women speakers were rare and highly suspect. Women who spoke in pubic to
mixed audiences were considered by most people to lack good sense and high
moral character” (Foster 11). “Denying the womanliness of women speaking in
public was a familiar ploy. Hostile audiences questioned the sexual identity of
American women like the antislavery poet Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper...The challenge was to the woman’s authenticity” (Painter 139).

24

Ostensibly the intense insults and scorn was meant to expose Wheatley, Truth or
Harper as frauds and thus to render them voiceless.

During their lifetime, Wheatley, Truth and Harper were public figures and
Teny was a private citizen. Neverflieless, Meatley, Truth, Harper and Terry
confronted authorities, claimed their right to speak and were heard. Was their
experience unique to women in the public arena or did African American women
in the private sphere face a similar battle in laying claim to their voices? Terry
seems to be a woman of some economic standing in her community. Although
the public women represent different economic classes they each, seemingly,
responded to a need to articulate their oppressions and the degradation and
humiliations of their people. Black women, it seems, believe that they have a
right to articulate their concerns to whom they choose and where and when they
find the need. Their use of voice becomes more of a revolutionary act when
considering that the antebellum courts also worked to silence Black women.

In 1855 the value and meaning of the voice of an enslaved black woman
and her womanhood was defined legally; thus providing a legal basis on which to
judge the voices of other black women. The 1855 antebellum case of the State
of Missouri v Celia2 more directly demonstrates the attempted dehumanizing
relegation of black women to voicelessness in the United States, and justified
ignoring our voices. As has been pointed out time and again, Celia was a young
woman without a last name. Apparently the court recorders did not see fit to
offer a surname. At the age of fourteen, Celia was purchased by Robert
Newsom, a seventy-year-old farmer in 1850. On the way home, the Iicentious

25

Newsom stopped to rape Celia. “The historical record indicates that this was
very likely Celia’s initial sexual experience” (McLaurin 25). Subsequently,
Newsom was the father of one of Celia’s children and he was rumored to be the
father of her other child as well. According to Leon Higginbotham’s account
Celia had been sick since February of 1855.
One witness at her later trial testified that she threatened to hurt her
slavemaster if he continued to force her to have sexual intercourse
with him while she was sick. From the summarized testimony, one
could find that on June 23, 1855, Celia told Newsom that she would
hurt him if he would not stop sexually abusing her. The master had
told her that he was “coming down to her cabin that night.” She told
him not to come and that she would hurt him if he came. Celia then
“armed herself with a stick.” He came down that night, and she
struck him with the stick twice. He apparently died immediately.
(Shadee of FMom 100).
Although Newsom believed that there was no reason to listen to Celia’s warning
to leave her alone, witnesses heard her admonition. Celia, it is said, apprised
Newsom of her intent to be left alone in front of others. According to McLaurin, “it
is almost certain that Celia approached Vrrginia and Mary” (Newsom’s two
daughters) (31). McLaurin maintains that Celia, without the support of a slave
community, or any community “was forced to confront her dilemma alone” (31).
The judge, like Newsom, found that statutorily, as a Black woman, Celia did not

have a right of self defense, that it was not “a crime to defile her by duress or

26

force” (Higginbotham 1996 100). In short Newsom had no bgal reason to listen
to Celia’s warning. Apparently he purchased her for sex labor and that is what
he acted on prior to his death. She was convicted of murder in the first degree
and sentenced to be hanged. After conviction Celia’s only legitimate worth to the
ruling culture was as breeder. Therefore, she was not hanged until she gave
birth. Her baby was stillborn.

Celia’s case is a blatant and perhaps extreme example of the voice of a
Black woman being ignored, her identity obscured, and her life doubly stolen to
prove that Black women may have the power to keep their pledge but ultimately
lacked power over their bodies. As a young woman, Celia bore the responsibility
of defending herself. After years of abuse she told others and directly warned
Newsom to leave her alone, then armed herself with a stick. As a woman and as
a slave Celia was certainly an individual whose only reliable means or resources
were within herself. Knowing the consequences of her actions, Celia recognized
the value in her voice and gave herself permission to fight back. Celia is one
example of many enslaved and formerly enslaved African American women in
this country who utilized the most familiar tool at their disposal to reinforce their
humanity, satisfy their psyches, articulate their experiences, express their intent
and attempt to combat abuses—their voices. Celia, clearly, was as good as her
word.

Some of the places to study the voices of African American women during
the nineteenth century are diaries, newspapers, oral interviews, speeches,

literature and women’s escaped and former slave narratives, and the Schomburg

27

Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers collection. Nineteenth-
century women’s narratives are a good place to begin because the nanatives
establish a tradition of voice and public response. In his foreword to the
Mburg Library of Nineteenth-Centugy Black Women Writers Colmen
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., demonstrates that “the progenitor of the black literary
tradition was a woman” (x). He goes on to acknowledge that “despite this
pioneering role of black women in the tradition... many of their contributions
before this century have been all but lost or unrecognized” (xi). Although black
women writers dominated the final decade of the nineteenth century, Gates adds
that:
many of the books reprinted in this set experienced a similar fate,
the most dreadful fate for an author: that of being ignored then
relegated to the obscurity of the rare book section of a university
library. We can only wonder how many other texts in the black
woman’s tradition have been lost to this generation of readers or
remain unclassified or uncatalogued and, hence, unread (xii).
Ignoring the works of African American women writers is tantamount, for me, to
dismissing what the women had to say. Furthermore, because there is a
tradition of overlooking the works of Black women writers, critics decide who they
will critique and what is commendable in the texts. Critiques often parallel the
aesthetics and droughts of the general public—i.e., who is worthy, who is a
heroine, and who and what is beautiful. This is also a justification as to why

McIntosh, a woman, can write an essay on how vocal Black women should talk

28

to Black men in relationships. As one can see from the State of Missouri v. Celia
the emotions, physical ailment and voice of a Black women were statutorily
valueless against unwanted sexual assault and state sanctioned death. But if he
valued his life he would heed her words.

em is the first novel published in the United States by an African
American in 1859; it is another location to begin a discussion on power, voice
and voicelessness. Racial constructions of gender, class and sexuality tensions
in this novel begin with its title and title page. It reads:

OUR NIG
or,
Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,
In a Two-Story White House, North
SHOWING THAT SLAVERY’S SHADOWS FALL EVEN THERE.
BY “OUR NIG”

The title cover sheet suggests the race and gender of its author. The title begins
with the possessive Mg. All in capital letters (QQR NIG), it highlights an
expletive; moreso, it represents an introduction and a vociferation or bellow from
a group of individuals, connected in some way, who claim custody or tenure to
the free Black described on the third line. The free Black tells the potential
reader that the book contains sketches from her/his life, not from the life of a
“Nig” living in Southern bondage, but one living in the North, period. One
imagines that up to that point the potential reader has hypothesized that the story
takes place in the antebellum South. The parenthetical placement of the

29

significant but unexpected location, “NEED.” is anything but incidental; it directly
confronts Northern residents who liked to frown on the brutality and gaucheness
of Southemers. The author then reinforces the emphasis on the North by
alerting or reminding the public, in all capital letters, that her/his take will be
”Showing that Slavepfis Shadows Fall Even There.” The author seems
determined to let the public know that in 1859 the South was not the only place
that misused, oppressed, and subjugated human beings. Blyden Jackson also
finds that the title “argue[s] against too much optimism in comparing the lot of
the Negro in the North with the corresponding disposition of the Negro in the
South” (351-352). In the spirit of continuing to air what some (Northemers?)
would want to be hidden, the author identifies him/herself as “Our Nig” (enclosed
within quotation marks). This mocking reinforcement of “Our Nig,” as author, is
derisive, caustic and (with tongue in cheek) playful ridicule. “Our Nig” claims
voice and talks back.

This mixture of direct address with “in yo face signifiyin” in this
declamatory title is usually attributed to Negro women identified in other
nineteenth-century narratives as sassy or saucy. Like the market women of
Charleston, South Carolina “Our Nig” is disorderly (in terms of the ruling culture)
because her speech, manner, tone and thesis are less than accommodating by
Northern standards of mid nineteenth century day. Moreover, with increased
disregard to public opinion, but acknowledging the public’s preoccupation with
women’s morality and racial prejudice, “Our Nig” employs selected verse (by

Holland) on the title page to remind the public that for many women, virtue is

30

crucified, the guiltless suffer bloody punishments and innocent gentle spirits
respond to heavenly guise only to fall prey to the ubiquitous temptations of hell.
Moving beyond the poetic metaphors, the author testifies to and manipulates the
situational and ideological contexts of the time on her title page by bringing
issues of race, gender and class into focus as she simultaneously begins to offer
a vocal but unembodied critique of power. I think it Is clear that the author of M
Njg is unquestionably a Black woman—Harriet Wilson.

At a time when the literacy rate for Negroes was minimal, Vlfilson directly
appeals to “...my colored brethren universally for patronage, hoping they will not
condemn this attempt of their sister to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful
band of supporters and defenders” (Preface). She also directs her book to “my
colored brethren universally” rather than to “the refined and cultivated” (Preface).
It appears that Wilson is appealing to a working or enslaved class of colored folk.
Harryette Mullen in “Runaway Tongue” states that writers like Wilson “conscious
of the inaccessibility of literacy to the majority of black women, deploy the trope
of orality to represent in their texts a ‘social diversity of speech types’ or
‘heteroglossia’” (254). Wilson’s numerous unpleasant experiences make her
publicize what she believes needs to be known or reinforced to a public with the
understanding that she could expect some sort of a backlash, as example by her
selection of poetry on the front page of her novel.

I wonder if Wilson, like the other nineteenth century women discussed in
chapter two, expected decades of critical textual voicelessness as her

punishment for sassin a public that allowed a child like Frado (Wilson’s

31

protagonist) to be unloved and tortured? Curiously, Vlfilson’s unequivocally
historic novel remained in the shadows for over sixty years. Regarding the
disappearance of Wilson and her novel Gates conducted an exhaustive search
for critiques on Wilson’s novel, which he details in the introduction. Although he
researched many sources for some mention of Wilson’s work WM
§leyegy Publications in America, 1750-1§63, US. Bureau of Education Report of
1893-1894, and a I ue Rare a hl ...u nSu '

I ' t Past ondition fthe Colored Ra the SI 9 ' ' n l
mis Coum 1894) including “late nineteenth and early twentieth-century black
biographical dictionaries” he was unable to find any mention of mg (ml-
)oorii). Gates goes on to mention more omissions. Such disregard would lead
one to question if Wilson existed at all regardless if she were a Black woman.
Her identity is confirmed by Gates, in one way, by matching Wilson’s name “that
appears on the copyright page of the first edition of my to a name listed on
the obituary of George Mason Wilson (Wilson’s son) as it appeared in the
Amherst, New Hampshire’s Fermer’s Caeinet (xiii). I, like Gates and other
scholars, am curious as to why Wilson’s historically significant Boston publication
was ignomd. To compound this disregard, “...Boston in 1859, [was] a veritable
center of abolitionist reform and passion, and ...a growing black press [was]
eager to celebrate all black achievement in the arts and sciences” (m). Neither
Gates nor historians Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson (A Shining
Thread of Hm) know why QLLNjg was ignored. However, Gates points out that
Wilson’s “...text seems to have been ignored or overIooked both by her ‘colored

32

brethren universally’ and by even the most scrupulous scholars during the next
one hundred and twenty-three years, for reasons as curious and as puzzling as
they are elusive, reasons about which we can venture rather little more than
informed speculation” (xiii-xiv). He speculates that Wilson’s bold themes and title
were reasons for her silencing. More specifically, I believe Wilson and her work
were forced into a critical voicelessness because there was not one literary critic
or historian willing to testify to the significance of my.

What does it mean to testify? In Bleck Telk Geneva Smitherman defines
testify as: “in the Traditional Black Church to give affirmation to the power and
truth of something; when Gittin the Spirit, people often testify. By extension, to
celebrate through verbal acknowledgement the greatness of anything, or one’s
strong feelings about something” (222). Testify according to Clarence Major, in
Jug to Jive, means “to confess one’s sins, bad deeds, life story (originally in
church but now in music, in literature, and through other forms of art); to ritually
comment upon any cultural experience understood by all black people; a secular
or religious confession” (469). Testifyin in church could also be considered part
of the emotionally charged religious services of many black churches which
many middle-class colored folk found shameful. Late nineteenth century early
twentieth century found many middle and upper-class colored folk promoting
cultural refinement and intellectual development rather than emotionally charged
religious practices, of which testimony is a part. “The educabd ministry and laity
in the late ninwenth century commonly encouraged a less demonstrative

worship style than the ‘shout,’ bodily movement, or moaning and clapping

33

prevalent among the folk” (E. Higginbotham, 1993, 44). When I invoke aspects
of testimony embedded within its use is also a question of economic class.
Wilson recognizes this when she makes the distinction between “my colored
brethren universally” rather than to “the refined and cultivated” (Preface). As
stated previously, it could be such a marking that contributed to her silencing.
Mem’m—Mbeter’e Qollgiete ng'enag Tenm Edition defines testify as: “to
make a statement based on personal knowledge or belief: bear witness...to
serve as evidence of proof. To express personal conviction. To make a solemn
declaration under oath for the purpose of establishing a fact (as in a court)”
(1218). Merriam-Webster's definition is also part of testifyin without the
celebration, emotion, culture and economic class. Nevertheless, it is the testifyin
quality in their works that make the voices of the women stand out to me.

Karla Holloway, argues for an Afrocentric interpretive model for black
women’s literature, while focusing on metaphors she identifies a
transformational-generative theory “language is understood to have at least two
levels of meaning—one having to do with performance, and the other with
comprehension” (22). The surface structure of the language, for example the
traditional lexicon theory (white, male and Western), Holloway finds are
“semantically meager in comparison to the linguistic deep structures they
represent. In these (deeper) places, the sounds and sense of culture and
experience generate within the linguistic surface structures” (22). The
nineteenth-century narratives bear witness to the fact that the women existed;

but more than that, they testify to what It meant to be a Black woman in the

nineteenth century Southern United States. However, within each text exists
places “within his linguistic surface structures” where some readers can “Witness”
culture and experiences of African American women. Even today, 2001, there
are folk who understand the strange dance involved in being referred to as “Our
Nig.” There are more who would glory in the power step that mocks and puts
back in yo face the same name you tried to condescend and oppress me wit. In
a testifyin mode, I attempted to recreate Black English in the previous sentence.
Further, in responding to their testifyin there are times when I believe my
sister/ancestors need the acknowledgement of a capital letter/proper noun when
standard English deems it inappropriate. l incorporate a capital ‘8’ for Black
women or I use the proper noun Negro which also speaks to a particular time
frame in American history. The storytellers want the readers to feel the power of
their experiences but for a testifyin tribute the reader must go beyond the surface
structure of text and acknowbdge the passion involved in the women’s
experience.

Though I have limited my discussion of M to the title page and
Wilson’s Preface, Mullen is also compelled to comment on the language of main
women characters in this novel:

The novel’s protagonist, F rado, counters the compartmentalized
language of the “two-story white house” with a resistant sassiness,
while the narrator appropriates the literate, public, and euphemistic
language of the sentimental novel and condemns Mrs. Bellmont for

the private, abusive speech she uses, as she-devil of the house, to

35

discipline the colored servant confined with her to the domestic
sphere. Because F rado’s sass challenges the assumption that her
body “belongs” in the kitchen rather than the parlor, or elsewhere,
(254-255).
It is not until M13 reemerged, toward the end of the twentieth century, that
critics have had an opportunity to respond to the voices in Wilson’s novel.
Wilson’s voice in the Preface is direct. The reader is able to see Frado, the
protagonist, come to voice.

Well over a hundred years after its publication, this reemergence begins to
dismantle the critical voicelessness and give way to new exploration of mg.
K. Holloway (1992) finds in the African American literary tradition there is a
displacement of the hegemony of Western ideology with the “occupation of the
necromancers—the creative crafters of the word—within the black literary
tradition. Their contemporary and historical work persistently dislocates the
superstitions of Western ideologies (23-24). Wilson’s work was easily forgotten
because ”its motivation has been to assert the voice and to affirrn the humanity
that the Western world has conspired to suppress and deny. An essential loss
of critical substance occurs in this failed acknowledgment. The dialectic between
the critical audience and the text is diminished. A result of this
subjective/objective fragmentation is theoretical invisibility or silence” (K.
Holloway 23). In articulating her own cultural identity Wilson wanted to negate
white stereotypes of blacks and “in their place insert a black worldview or
standpoint” (E. Higginbotham 15). Evelyn Higginbotham underlines the

importance of “the dialogic racial representations effected by blacks themselves
against negative representations—or more precisely, blacks’ appropriation of the
productive power of language for the purpose of resistance” (15). Wilson
unquestionably claims her power to tell her story beginning with her title.
Because she had the power of the pen, She inverted, subverted and played with
“our nig.”

Critical voicelessness, like voice, can assume many forms. In Boston,
1861, two years after the publication of Wilson’s em Harriet Jacobs, using
the pseudonym Linda Brent, published the now classic account of her twenty-
seven years in slavery in her narrative titled, Incidente in m Life of e Slave Girl.
Like Qur_l\_lig this narrative also suffered critical silence. One can immediately
see the difference in voice between Wilson and Jacobs. An enslaved North
Carolinian woman by birth and a bit more diplomatic than \Mlson, Jacobs asserts
on the title page that “’Northemers know nothing at all about Slavery...They have
no conception of the depth of degradation involved. . . if they had, they would
never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown’” (sic n. pag.).
Vlfilson, a Northerner, would differ with Jacobs’ observation; however, I do not
think she would differ with Jacobs in urging that the North continue efforts to
dismantle slavery. Jacobs also worked with abolitionists and identified her
audience as “the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two
millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and

most of them far worse” this too may also account for her literary diplomacy

37

(Preface). Although diplomatic, Jacobs makes it clear that enslaved Black
women lived under very different conditions than Euro American women.
Today mom nts is heralded as an historic text unique in the annals of
escape slave narratives. However, during most of the twentieth century Meme
was believed to be a fraud. Ironically, Mary Helen Washington finds that:
In his 1972 edition of his landmark study of slave nanatives, gem
m, John Blassingame dismisses Jacobs’s story as too
melodramatic to be authentic. Using the male slave narrative as
the standard, Blassingame cannot accept this “nonstandard” female
slave narrative with its peculiar form, the many examples of
“miscegenation and outraged virtue, unrequited love, and planter
licentiousness appear on practically every page” (sic 7).

John Blassingame’s conclusion, one hundred and eleven years after the

publication of lnfl’ entsI demonstrates how an eminent historian can continue the

disruption and repression of a black female voice.

In order to reinforce cultural identity, articulate racial and gender
oppressions and provide psychic relief from subjugation, Black women writers
use sass as an aspect of oral communication style. “Linda [Jacobs] uses sass
the way that Frederick Douglass used his fists and his feet, as a means of
resistance” (Braxton 32). Like Wilson when identifying the author as “Our Nig,”
Jacobs uses sass and indirection but hers is a more feminine double entendre.

Mullen asserts:

within the oral tradition black women have been anything but silent,
unless literally beaten, muzzbd, starved, or otherwise suppressed
to the point of speechlessness. As for black women writers, if
anything, their discursive silencing has been itself a by-product of
literacy and of their inability to control sites and conditions of their
own textual production, or ensure It an appropriate reception (259).
On the cover sheet the author is identified as ”Written by Herself.” The escaped
slave narrative convention identified authors as ”Written by Himself,” however,

the name of the escaped slave usually appeared in the title. For example: _The

[mgfing Negm of the Life of Olaudah Eguiano or Gusgvee Vfl, the
Afrign. Written by Himself, H'etery of May Pring, A m Indien Sleve.

Related by Herself and Narratiy' e of me Life em Adventug ef Henry Bibb, An
W Written by himself. Claiming authorship in ways such as Wilson

and Jacobs calls attention to the collective abuses enslaved Blacks and women
suffemd at that time. Also on her title page Jacobs immediately addresses her
intended audience. “’Rise up, ye women that are at easel Hear my voice, ye
careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech’” (n. pag.). She is urging true
women, with exclamation, to action. Jacobs immediately insures that her voice is
softened for public consumption with the inclusion of her famous editor’s name
on her cover—L. Maria Child.

Jacobs assumes the format of both an escaped slave narrative and the

sentimental novel. The tone of this merger also causes Jacobs to appear less

39

assertive than Wilson. In her introduction to the Schomburg edition of M,
Valerie Smith critiques the genres Jacobs appropriates:
Jacobs’s readers were accustomd to a certain degree of propriety
and circumlocution in fiction. In keeping with cultural injunctions
against women’s assertiveness and directness in speech, the
literature they wrote and read tended to be “exercises in
euphemism” that excluded certain subjects from the purview of
fiction. The tension between the decorousness of the genre and
the urgency of the slave woman’s situation thus underscores how
inadequate the sentimental novel’s techniques are in telling
Jacobs’s story. They fall, like those of the slave narrative, to meet
the demands of her situation. If the male context of the slave
narrative renders her invisible, then so too do the white middle-
class assumptions of the sentimental novel marginalize her ()oodii).
Jacobs then is attempting to speak, navigating between “multiple and complex
social, historical, and cultural positionalities” (Henderson 19). Again, here is the
emphasis that Black women’s voices must attempt to be pliable and adaptable
while simultaneously moored in African American Vernacular Culture.
Conversely, Smith sees the power of Jacobs’ voice in her narrative.
...although Jacobs’s account is closely circumscribed by the
conventions of these two genres, she is able to negotiate her way
around their limitations in a manner Similar to the way she

negotiates her freedom. By manipulating linguistic spaces—verbal

4O

equivalents analogous to the garret in which she hides for several
years and from which she orchestrates her freedom—she
interrogates the two genres and points out their inadequacy to her
story (xxxiii).

Although Jacobs appealed to a particular audience her testimonial voice is
loud and clear". “I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the
people of the Free States what Slavery really is” (Preface). Mae Gwendolyn
Henderson observes “black women writers enter into testimonial discourse with
black men as blacks, with white women as women, and with black women as
black women” (20). In a related footnote Henderson goes on to state:

Black women enter into dialogue with other black women in a
discourse that I would characterize as primarily testimonial,
resulting from a Similar discursive and social positionality. It is this
commonality of history, culture, and language which, finally,
constitutes the basis of a tradition of black women’s expressive
culture. In terms of actual literary dialogue among black women, I
would suggest a relatively modern provenance of such a tradition,
but again, one based primarily on a dialogue of affirrnation rather
than contestation (217 n15).
Issues of testifyin enter this discussion often; for that reason I intend to include
Testifyin Theory as my approach to the materials in this dissertation.
To testify theory is to acknowledge that African American

testimonial discourse has been a site for “insurgent black

41

intellectual life.” It is to affirm that one of multiple locations for
theory production is the oral tradition and that testifying as a speech
act within black church services has always been preceded by the
open invitation, “Can I get a witness?” It is not simply the learned
who may answer this call, but anyone who is lucid, the granny as

well as the scholar (Lee 79-80).

Testifyin Theory Represents on Angle of Vision...

As I have tried to make clear, when one testifies another must be there to
witness. To witness, however, one must connect, relate or feel energy of the
testimony. Witnessing is an inspired act causing one to respond in some way.
One witnesses in various ways—nod of the head, a raised arm with an opened
palmed hand, standing, tears, clapped hands, such actions may include the
following moumful or jubilant exclamations “yess,” “Aman,” “mmm,” uh ha” and
so on. As part of the oral tradition witnessing is a spontaneous act of
discernment, comprehension, awareness and agreement. There is an
unmistakable testifyin quality in the conjure women stories to whom Charles
Chesnutt devotes a book.

An example of the curious but blatant literary critical stereotyping and
voicelessness of Plantation Creole speakin Black women can be found in the
work of another Negro writer from North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt's I_I_ie
Conjure Women. Unlike Wilson and Jacobs, Chesnutt’s literary fame has

remained consistent since his turn of the century publications. The Conjure

42

W_om_an is generally hailed for its sense of justice and plantation tales that
differed from Thomas Nelson Page, Harry Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable
and so on. In his introduction to The Conjure Wgnan, Robert M. Famsworth
finds that Chesnutt abandoned “the sentimental fantasy of plantation life..., he
was deliberately cautious in what he said to a white audience whom he
suspected of being hostile and knew to be uninformed” (vii). Although the book
is a series of frame stories, those filtered through the “folk” wisdom of the
character Julius include stories that feature the exploits of several conjure
women and one conjure man. “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Po’ Sandy” are
often anthologized. Ironically, rarely does a critic focus on the contributions of
the conjure woman or women. I find this especially bizarre because Chesnutt
titles his collection The Conjure Women and not Ung gulig’ Plantem n lag. If
the conjure women characters were removed from the stories “The Goophered
Grapevine” could not exist and “Po’ Sandy[‘s]” life would be quite different, for
example. Famsworth acknowledges “implications in the folk nature of the
stories” that hinge on “blacks’ identification with mysterious natural forces” (xiv).
Perhaps the references to “mysterious natural forces” is Famsworth’s coded
description for Chesnutt’s conjure women; otherwise he fails to acknowledge
their significance to the collection. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman is significant
for many reasons; however, I am concerned with the orality of the Black
characters and the fact that the occupation of the woman is respected and
uniquely ascribed to people of color in this country. In her unconventional study

Ganny Midwivg 8 Bleck Women Writers, Valeria Lee appropriately reminds

43

readers that “rather than the negative associations of witchcraft, conjuring has
been an empowering concept for many black women. Nancy and Peggy’s angle
of vision suggests that conjuration is one of the most natural abilities/skills of
which to avail ones self. Conjuring pays homage to an African past, while
providing a present day idiom for magic, power, and ancient wisdom within a
pan-African cultural context” (13). Chesnutt’s book, Ine Conjure flo_m_en
demonstrates, that Plantation Creole, Black dialect or Black speech placed within
the mouths of Black women reinforce the stereotyping and voicelessness that
related Negro women characters suffered in literature.

Chesnutt’s conjure woman, Peggy, is described as a single, self-employed
Negro woman who has her own cabin in a neighborhood of free blacks. She is
specially trained, expects respect, is approachable but perceived as dangerous
by the community. In addition to being a conjure woman who “’could wuk de
mos’ powerfulles’ kin’ er goopher‘” Julius discloses “...’she wuz a witch ‘sides
being’ a cunjuh ‘oman’” (15). In “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” Chesnutt assumes the
role of ventriloquist and demonstrates the communication style of two Negro
women in antebellum North Carolina and how they worked together to solve a
familial betrayal. “Sis” is a telling aspect of the title because the women (Peggy
and Nancy) work together like sisters to bring about a solution for, their sister of
the skin, Becky. Nancy is the plantation nurse who cares for the children while
the parents are forced to work in the fields. Becky’s son is Mose. His father was
sold away, and subsequently, Becky too is sold without Mose. Nancy assumes
responsibility for Mose who becomes sick for want of his mother. Although the

mistress of the house found Mose a “lackly little nigger” whom she would be
willing to summon a doctor to examine, Nancy decided to take Mose to Peggy,
the conjure woman along with an offering of gmen peas (145). Like market
women, Nancy and Peggy begin to haggle:
“’Dat is a monst’ us small mess er peas you is fotch me,’
“’Yas, I knows,’...’but dis yere is a monst’ us small
pickaninny.’
“’You’ll hafter fetch me sump’ n mo’,. ..’fer you can’t spec’ me
ter was’e my time diggin’ roots en wukkin’ cunj’ation fer nuffin.’
“...’I’II fetch you sump’n mo’ nex’ time.”
“’You bettah,’ sez Aun’ Peggy, ‘er e’se dey’ll be trouble.
Wat dis yet little pickaninny needs is ter see his mammy. You
leabe ‘im heah ‘tel ebenin’ en I’ll show ‘im his mammy’” (146).
Peggy uses an assertive, direct tone with Nancy. Nancy hears the culturally
intoned ‘monst’ and ‘marks’3 it in a humorous and indirect way in her response.
This is the first and only time in the collection that an individual challenges Peggy
(face to face) about her unspoken fee. Peggy is a professional and demands
respect as demonstrated by her direct response to Nancy when she described
why she requires an increase. Acknowledging the skillfulness of Peggy’s work
Nancy is still direct, open and bold when she tells Peggy “...nex’ time.” However,
when will next time arrive? Once Peggy is satisfied with Nancy’s recognition of
her position the signifyin smart talk continues and Peggy has the last word and

keeps Mose with her. Peggy does not tall or send Nancy to bring something

45

back immediately or give her a date to return her payment—in Colored People’s
Time (CP time) next time could be any time in the future. Peggy ends their
exchange with humor and indirection toward Nancy—“’er e’se dey’ll be trouble.”
Peggy’s final remark marks her peer status with Nancy. “Among peers...smart
talk is revered, applauded, and celebrated because of the mental skill and acuity
required in outsmarting a conversational partner” (van Dijk, Ting-Toomey,
Smitherrnan and Troutman 156). Peggy, more relaxed, offers an apparent
diagnosis and tells Nancy to leave Mose with her until the evening. The
exchange between Nancy and Peggy demonstrates a bit of the complex
communication styles Black women include. They are direct but respectful in
their speech and there seems to be signifyin on Nancy's part.

Their direct verbal exchange gives way to comfortable, pleasant and
playful articulations. Nancy gets tired of taking Mose back and forth and finding
items with which to pay Peggy and she proposes: “’Aun’ Peggy, aln’ day no way
you kin fetch Sis’ Becky back home?" (emphasis mine 150).

“’Huhl I dunno ‘bout dat. I’ll hafter wuk my roots en fin’ out whuther l kin
er no. But it’ll take a monst'us heap er wuk, an I can’t was’e my time fer nuffin.
Ef you’ll fetch me sump’n ter pay me fer my trouble, I reckon we kin fix it’”
(emphasis mine 150). Peggy’s tone is even more comfortable with Nancy. They
communicate like sisters who have taken on the responsibility of a toddler.
Neither Mose’s plight nor Nancy’s compassion must be suffered alone. Peggy‘s
use of the pronoun “we” indicates that responsibility for solving this situation rests

on both women—Peggy and Nancy. Nevertheless, Peggy maintains that she

46

must be paid for her services. She no longer condescends to offer another
obvious prognosis of the situation, only that she be given some compensation for
her “trouble.” Nancy offers her Sunday head-handkerchief and asks “'IMII dat
do?” (150). A pleased Peggy “look’ at de head-handkercher, en run her han’
ober it, an sez shez—‘Yas, dat’ll do fus’ -rate”’ (151). It appears that Peggy
appreciates the dignity and grace of Nancy’s offering; furthermore, there must be
an impregnable relationship between the women for Nancy to make a gift to the
conjure woman of something that she has kept so close to her body. Peggy and
Nancy’s selfless acts reunite mother (Becky) and with her son who later frees his
mother and himself. Peggy and Nancy’s accomplished good deed is its own
reward.

Robert Bone devotes thirteen pages to Chesnutt’s The Conjure Wemen,
and six or seven lines to Peggy—the conjure woman. Peggy is undoubtedly the
conjure woman to whom Chesnutt’s title refers. Bone mentions the name Aunt
Peggy when summarizing the story “Sis' Becky’s Pickaninny,” Chesnutt’s
abbreviated version of Biblical Moses. Bone holds that mother (Becky) and son
(Mose) in the end are “reunited, but not until the devious maneuvers of a conjure
woman trick the white folks into canceling the trade” (86). Like Nancy and
Peggy, Bone too has an angle of vision. In the following paragraph, Bone
decides to name the “devious maneuvering conjure woman.” He states that “the
center of the fable consists of two metamorphoses performed by Aunt Peggy, the
plantation conjure woman” (86). Overall Bone fictionally affirms “the blacks,

however, with their belief in magic, conjuration, and the like, are seen to possess

47

in ample measure the saving quality of imagination. ...Bourgeois civilization, in
short, suffers from a contempt for the imagination” (86). Bernard W. Bell in fire
Afro Armrign Novel and its Tradition, (identified as an update or replacement for
Bone’s The Negro Novel in America), uses less space to ignore Aunt Peggy and
her ilk, and states that “Uncle Julius ...spins off a series of wry wonder tales that
exploit the ignorance of whites about the ways of black folk while simultaneously
affirming the humanity of both” (65). Peggy and Nancy represent camaraderie
among the oppressed women, resistance to the degradations of slavery and
triumph over corruption.

Though Charles W. Chesnutt like his stories from the book The Cenjnre
Men are remembered by critics and in literary collections, why is the conjure
woman, as a character, quickly forgotten by many scholars? Sociolinguist Keith
Gilyard, in his study Lg’s Flip the Scrint, credits Chesnutt use of “alternate
voices” in “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Dave’s Neckliss”4 (54). As
previously stated, Chesnutt titles his book The anjug Wemen for a reason. It
seems to me that he wanted to feature the conjure woman, not make her
invisible. In addition, the conjure women in the book are round and often heroic
characters in many instances. One could argue that Chesnutt suppresses the
voices of the conjure women within the frame of his collection. However, I
believe that his title forces the conjure women from the confines of the frame to a
critically larger portion of this work. I believe it is Peggy’s voice, confidence,

abilities, sense of fair play rather the verisimilar nature of her character that make

48

some readers want to ignore her—she’s too accomplished. Yet, when one looks
from an angle of vision similar to Peggy and Nancy, they stand out.

Chesnutt’s conjure women suffer the same critical silencing that was
meted out to Wilson, Jacobs, many nineteenth-century Black women writers,
Hopkins, Fauset, and others. Chesnutt was redwmed, I assume, by his
maleness. As a writer Chesnutt is remembered; he is even remembered for
penning W though few, it seems, can recall who or what the
significance is of the conjure woman. Rickford and Rickford, in Smken Soul,
assert that “through the years, the caravan of black storytellers who spun yams
with the vernacular did so because they acknowledged, publicly or privately, that
‘homely' speech patterns carried currency in their own community” (16). More
specifically, it is apparent that Chesnutt recreated the speech patterns of women
he probably heard as a child. Perhaps he tapped into what Collins calls a Black
women’s standpoint, a standpoint that carries currency with a certain community
of women. It is from that angle of vision that Peggy and Nancy, for example, can
be appreciated. The sass, use of Plantation Creole and other aspects of voice of
Negro women in nineteenth century writing, for example, is valuable for those
who recognize the testifyin quality and the harmony of their muIti-voiced
messages. Ignoring or minimizing the voices of Negro women has deprived
American literature of wider audiences and other critical insights. “Maintaining
the invisibility of Black women and our ideas is critical in structuring patterned

relations of race, gender, and class inequality that pervade the entire social

49

 

structure” (Collins 5). The voices of Black women in literature offer insight into
how women met the social structure.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’ birth and novel publication mark two significant
moments in literary history. At the same time that Chesnutt’s jne Conjuge
V_Vgr_nen appears, Hopkins copyrighted her first novel Contending Pom—1899.
Moreover, Hopkins is born in Portland, Maine, 1859, the same year that Wilson
published her novel, M19. Interestingly, many early Negro women writers
honed their writing skills in the East or more specifically as in the instance of
Harriet Wilson in New England—Lucy Teny, Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, Nancy
Gardener Prince, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, for example. Hopkins grew up
in Boston and begins to gain literary recognition at the age of fifteen as a student
in Boston Girls High School. According to Arm Allen Shockley, William Wells
Brown, “first black novelist and playwright,” presenbd Hopkins with her “prize of
ten dollars in gold for writing the best essay on the ‘Evlls of Intemperance and
Their Remedy’” (289). Five years later, “she continued her writing pursuits as a
playwright, composing a four-act musical drama, “‘Peculiar Sam; or, the
Underground Railroad (1879)” (Shockley 289). In 1880, Hopkins along with her
family and others performed a modified version of her play to receptive
audiences. Shockley also states “The Hopkins Colored Troubadours also gave
recitals and concerts ...Pauline was praised by the press for her ‘beautiful voice’
and was called ‘Boston’s favorite Colored Soprano’” (290). It must have been
quite a confidence builder to have one’s voice reaffirrned in such positive ways,

by parents, friends, strangers, and the press, while so young. Such

50

accomplishments and accolades must have reassured Hopkins that not only did
she have something to say, but the public was eager to hear and respond.
Hopkins, therefore, had a voice that was acknowledged, accepted and
recognized, not one made voiceless. Additionally, she became a stenographer
working for two affluent Republican politicians and later for the Bureau of
Statistics on the Massachusetts Census of 1895. I assume Hopkins realized that
she nwded a skill in addih'on to writing. Shockley points out that Hopkins also
lectured on black history in churches and schools during the four years she
worked for the Census. Hopkins, it appears, was steadfast and energetic in her
pursuit of educating the public. Her legacy is one of struggle, creativity and
literary achievements.

Chapter two will focus on Hopkins’ serialized novel Hagar’e Qanghter. I
will take a close look at the characters with particular attention given to women’s
voice. In my discussion of the character Venus Johnson, I will demonstrate how
Hopkins use of Plantation Creole/dialectlBlack English is linked to minstrelsy in
literary criticism. Claudia Tate in Domeetic Allegm ef Pol'm'gl Ceeige and
Kristina Brooks in her essay, “Mammies, Bucks, and Wenches” agree that the
working-class, Ebonic speaking, character Venus can not be the heroine of
Heger’e Daughter. I intend to challenge their positions. Additionally, their points
of view help to reinforce some of the reasons how and why working-class Black
women are made voiceless in literature. Hopkins’ working-class women
characters reflect a polyphonic discourse—they speak through more than one

language at once. Additionally, the chapter will compare the characteristics of

51

 

female characters who speak standard English to those who speak Plantation
Creole—their familial and romantic relations, economic class, heroine status,
intellect, and whether they are assertive or passive, for example. Finally, in the
spirit of testifyin theory the chapter will listen to what the women characters
testify. This analysis includes the clarifyin and attentive narrative voice. The
narrative voice occasionally and heavy handedly interrupts the flow of the novel
to make sure the reader understands the point being made. Hopkins employs
the term amalgamation and critics generally agree that that is Hopkins’ message
to the larger society. After highlighting the testifyin voices in Hegar’s Daughter
this chapter will examine what the idea of unity possibly meant for the women in
Heger’s Danght_er. Ultimately, I believe it is the testifyin quality in Hegerfe
Damhter and her other works that lead John Gruesser specifically to
characterize Hopkins as The Unruly Voice.

Just as \Mlson’s voice testifies to questionable intentions of some
abolitionists, Pauline Hopkins, bears witness to a similar problem. Hopkins goes
beyond Wilson’s affront to abolitionists with her character Cuthbert Sumner in
Hegar’e Daughter, for example. Cuthbert Sumner falls in love as slowly as snow
melts in the deep South; and his character unfolds as quickly as a hot summer
day in Georgia. In Reconetructing Womanhgig, Hazel V. Carby finds that in
Sumner".

Hopkins combined a New England background and heritage
with a family history of abolitionism to situate Sumner’s profeswd

sympathy for blacks and black equality. But he was also a figure

52

Hopkins used as a representation of the limits of white liberalism
and New England philanthropy, an illustration of the inherent and
disguised racism below the professed sympathy for black people
(1 51).
There is a reason why both Wilson and Hopkins (Eastern women writers) take
time to comment on New England abolitionists. Sumner, like most of the other
male characters in fieger’s Denghter, ruled Black women outside the statutory
rubric ”woman.” Through the genre of the escaped slave narrative some
abolitionists were able to manipulate the way Black escaped slaves told their
stories, and how their subjectivity was portrayed. This control contributed to
essentialist views of the American South and former slaves. Henderson finds:
If black women speak a discourse of racial and gendered difference
in the dominant or hegemonic discursive order, they speak a
discourse of racial and gender identity and difference in the
subdominant discursive order. This dialogic of difference and
dialectic of identity characterize both black women’s subjectivity
and black women’s discourse. It is the complexity of these
simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous social and
discursive domains out of which black women write and construct
themselves (as blacks and women and, often, as poor, black
women) that enables black women writers authoritatively to speak
to and engage both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic
discourse (20-21).

53

Linguists Teun A. van Dijk, Stella Ting-Toomey, Geneva Smitherrnan and Denise
Troutman find a different set of speech norms in the African American community
as a result of history, belief system and relationships “especially for African
American women, who hold a central role in the expression of the social reality of
the entire speech community” (150).

In The M of the Negro Pest, Melville J. Herskovits argues that African-
American culture retains African survivals—Africanisms. Africanisms are cleariy
observed in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Ebonics or Black
English. Africanisms are defined as “those elements of culture found in the New
World that are traceable to an African origin” (J. Holloway ix). Pioneering work in
the area of AAVE can be read in Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africaniems in m Gulleh
218.1%; J. L. Dillard’s Black English; Geneva Smitherrnan’s W;
and other sources.

In the Gullah dialect, linguist Turner found a preserved language saved
from disruption by a larger culture. Smitherrnan verifies,

Turner’s influence was to be short-lived and his work largely
ignored until its revival by Creolists in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g.,
Bailey 1965). American race relations in the 1940s entered its
period of the denial of differences ...by demonstrating that blacks
were just like whites—only darker. And given Anglo bias and
racism, certainly whites were not about to acknowledge that there

had been borrowings into white American speech from African

languages, as Turner’s work implied and as McDavId noted in his

review of Turner ( [alkin That Talk 76-77).
The influence of languages and dialects other than Standard English on
American culture is a deeply sensitive area and one that can cause ridicule and
rejection by many in American culture. Nevertheless, both Hopkins and Fauset
recognized the use of Black English as a Significant part of Negro culture and its
influence on the ruling culture. Further, Dillard finds that in being brought to
America, Negroes acquired a pidgin English through slave factories of the West
African Coast and barracoons. Retention of this pidgin became the basis for
Plantation Creole. The creolization of Plantation Creole gave way to a distinctive
language among American blacks separate from that of American whites.
Smithennan combines Africa and African-American oral and folk historical and
cultural presence to the technical and rule based aspects of dialect reinforcing
Black English as a language. I believe that some critics and readers, during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries misunderstand, misread or ignore the voices
of African American women once they moved outside of a middle-class, Anglo
woman paradigm that was considered the standard in which to judge acceptable
female behavior. Unquestionably many Negro women writers in the United
States, during the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, found it necessary
to incorporate the acceptable construct of woman but on occasion the voice,
language and behavior of woman exceeded the limits of true womanhood
protocol. I believe the women writers mentioned and discussed in this paper

Show themselves or constructed women characters not for shock value but to

55

more closely represent the myriad voices and values of Black women found in
their families and communities. Like Celia who understood the consequences of
her act, early Negro women creating Negro women in print probably understood
the expectation and perceptions of the general public toward me formerly
enslaved and recently freed human beings. I suspect, that they took their writing
seriously and worked to create characters that they could respect and
understand. Simultaneously, they had concerns that they wanted to reinforce or
make the public aware.

Angela Davis’ Bless Lgacies and Black Feminism, grounded the blues
lyrics and early blues singing women, like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie
Smith for example, to black feminism. Davis’ book reinforces that working-class
women had a way of articulating their oppressions and concerns as outlined in
the various themes that the women sang —migration, spousal abuse, sexual
intercourse, work, racism, power, violence, travel so on. Further, the singers
offered lyrical advice to their listeners. There appeared to be some sort of
solidarity or sisterhood in this blues community. In one part Davis likens what
women blues singers did to “a consciousness-raising strategy from the Chinese
women’s movement referred to as ‘speak bittemess,’ or ‘speak pains to recall
pains’ (28-29). By articulating/singing about a problem (even without a critical
perspective) it is ushered “out of the shadows of domestic life where society had
kept it hidden and beyond public or political scrutiny” (29-30). Davis pays close
attention to voice in her work as she distinguishes between when a singer is

being playful, satiric, and moumful, for example. Blues Lgacies is important

because it reminds readers of the consciousness of working-class women during
the 19203 and 30s and of Davis” dogged determination to attend/understand the
tonal delivery of the lyrics. In understanding the lyrics Davis also calls attention
to the need to comprehend Ebonics and African American culture.
In African American culture, as Davis points out, speech is not taken for
granted. She states:
In daily speech as well as in the aesthetic dimension, language has
always been rewrought and recast, playfully coaxed toward new
meanings, and sometimes ironically made to signify the opposite of
its literal meaning. Distinctive patterns both of everyday speech
and of slave songs manifested cultural connections between West
African linguistic customs and African-American English as it was
forged within and often against the system of slavery. While these
patterns were ritualized in the musical tradition, from the field
hollers and work songs to spirituals and the blues, daily speech
patterns acquired a decidedly aesthetic character (166).
Daryl Cumber Dance edited an anthology of African American women’s humor,
Ham Hnehl, and in her introduction she declares:

In addition to a propensity for subject matter and themes that
most often speak to our experience in this nation, African American
women’s humor is often characterized by a certain style that
includes a pmdilection for satire and irony, a delight in the

irreverent, a vigorous sense of force vitale, an insistance of reality

57

(“be real”), a love of contest/challenge! debate, and a delight in
drama and kinesics: the black woman worldwide is noted for that
most atavistic of all African American gestures—cut-eye, suck
teeth, an insulting gesture of disdain, ...The black woman is also
noted for that arching eyebrow and “the stare,” as well as some
unique head bobbing, neck swiveling, hip swinging, finger pointing,
hands on hips stances, and other gesticulations that form a
dynamic vocabulary of their own (mii—miii).

Dance also asserts, as does many linguists, that well educated and
middle- and upper-class African Americans appropriate Ebonics and slang
usually in private conversations. This appropriation of language (Black English)
can be witnessed in the works of the women detailed in this dissertation. The
work of Smitherrnan, Troutman, Davis, Dance, and Lee reinforce the need for
understanding the linguistic aspects associated with the orality/voice in the
writings of African American women.

Critic Mary Helen Washington asks “How does the heroic voice and heroic
image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her
heroism for its survival?” (xvii). In her work Invenm Lives, Washington
determines that the silencing of black women writers and their work has to do
with patriarchal power. She points out that “our ‘ritual journeys,’ our ‘articulate
voices,’ our ‘symbolic spaces’ are rarely the same as men’s. Those differences
and the assumption that those differences make women inherently inferior plus

the appropriation by men of the power to define tradition account for women’s

58

absence from our written records” (xviii). Literary scholars like Washington,
Hazel Carby, Ann Allen Shockley, Claudia Tate, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hull,
Carla Peterson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Frances Smith Foster, Jean Fagan
Yellin, Deborah E. McDowell and many others have worked assiduously
recovering and critiquing the works of many Afiican American women writers
whose work was paralyzed by voicelessness. Writers such as Harriet E. Vlfilson
and Harriet Jacobs, for example, did rely on a unified understanding that Negro
American women resided within a larger culture that served to subordinate,
terrorize, sexualize, racialize, and silence them. They began to define, denote
and explicate, for the public, what it meant to be Negro American women in the
United States where they were devalued as human beings.

There is also a silencing that goes on today when critics decide that there
is one authentic black female voice in American literature rather than many. The
women writers detailed in this study precede Zora Neale Hurston who is viewed
by some scholars as a writer whose voice captures the reality of black women’s
lives. Her work is also heralded as capturing the history and aesthetics of the
Negro in this country. One usually pays close attention to voice when reading
Hurston. As duCille points out “Hurston did not give birth to herself, unread, and
unassisted by literary models and inspiriting influences” (1993 83). DuCille
asserts “Hurston’s use of folklore and folk English seemed to respond to the
primitivist impulses of the era, but it placed her fiction outside the realm of what
the black intelligentsia considered positive representations of the Negro” (80).

Hurston's novels, for example, generally feature the South and heavy use of

59

Black English; perhaps that is why critics consider her the authentic voice of
African American females in American literature. Hurston is not the first African
American woman writer to use Ebonics, Black dialect, or African American
Vernacular English. Her use of Black English, for some, means that she
constructs the authentic Negro voice. However, it is clear that like stories there
are many voices. This dissertation will look at some early voices of African
American females in American literature.

My first chapter will prepare the ground for the discussion of Hopkins and
Fauset. I will locate an African American woman’s literary culture of public voice
and assertive communication style in seven nineteenth-century black women’s
narratives: Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darknfi Cometh the Light or Styggg
tom; Kate Drumgoold. ANS v irl’ ; W
Veney A Slave Woman; Louisa Pieguet the Octoroon; Memoir of Cld Elizabeth, A
Coloum Wemen; Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My life in Cemn; and

The Sign of MM’ ,1. Jageen. Negro women’s nineteenth century narratives

are rich with the voices and experiences of the enslaved and working-class
women who were faced with and managed abusive events that are so deeply
planted in the furrows of United States history they are ignored. Their voices and
experiences lay fallow between the covers of literary criticism but quickly bloom
when one is familiar with the communication styles of African American women.
In reading the narratives the oral quality of the women’s voices rise from their

pages to testify and thus reveal their poignant and heart-rending experiences that

60

antagonize some and offer personal views on the antebellum through post-
Reconstruction periods of United States history.

Intra-culturally or familiarly and within certain economic classes, the voices
of African American women are not dismissed for an obvious reason.
Understanding the forum, we are not perceived as comic, rude or obtuse by one
another, generally, unless that is the goal. In approaching the material I
acknowledge the use of Black English as a language familiar to most Blacks in
America, particularly during the nineteenth century into the early to mid twentieth
century. Further, there are aspects of Black English (proverbs, tales,
conventions, tactics, expressions and strategies) that are cultivated and thus
appreciated primarily in some African American communities. Such a linguistic
and cultural background present a different set of standards by which a body of
work is judged. When I, as an African American woman, read the work and
voices of Negro women I hear generations of my ancestors speak.

Oral tradition, voice and testimony are so primary to African American
women’s culture that even in narrative form women’s voices can be heard.
Furthermore, when an amanuensis is used the testimonial quality of her voice
still emerges. Focusing on granny midwives in the writings of African American
women Valeria Lee maintains “the writers try to maintain the spirit and language
of oral forms, inviting us to “hear” their novels as well as read them” (9-10). Along
with hearing their novels some readers also understand the significance of what

is simultaneously not said.

61

During the nineteenth century who could bear witness to the Black
women’s narrative testimonies? Undoubtedly any number of their family, friends
and most Negroes could testify, however, Western literary aesthetic required that
members of the literary elite had to recognize the value in the material to keep
the women’s narratives in print. Most slave narratives were written by fugitive
slaves who wrote about 35 percent of all narratives, black women wrote less than

12 percent, bondsmen wrote less than 5 percent and the “...ovenrvhelming

if?“ ' “5“; 1‘1]

majority of the narrators were among the most perceptive and gifted of the former
slaves” (Blassingame 1985 83). During much of the nineteenth century in the
antebellum South, where a large population of Negroes existed, it was illegal for
blacks to learn to read; therefore, who was left to testify to the value of the
nineteenth century women’s narratives?

Chapter one focuses on a group of formerIy enslaved women most made
voiceless for at least half a century. They emphasize the prominence and
significance of Black women’s public voices collectively referred to as sass.
Sass is an act of resistance by a group of women who flexed their verbal skills
rather than their muscles. Yet while sass can function as a form of resistance in
public discourse, among black women the act of sass is familial, and can be
characterized as testimonial. There is a tradition of Black women’s sass that can
be traced throughout the African Diaspora. The derivation of the word is
attributed to an unknown location in West Africa, more specifically according to
the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) an African tree “Erythrophloeum guineense
(Cynometra Mannii); also in sassy bark, -wood, the bark of this tree, a decoction

62

of which is used in West Africa as an ordeal poison” (493). The OED
characterizes sassy as colloquial U.S. term meaning “impudent, saucy, ‘cheeky’;
outspoken, provocative; conceited, pretentious; self-assured, spirited; bold;
vigorous, lively; stylish, ‘chic” (494). There is plenty of sass in the women

included in this dissertation.

:‘I

Jessie Fauset, like Hopkins, has four published novels. Her novels

suggest a concern with conflicts in women’s sexuality, independence, family

a: . ems-re».

loyalty, economic classes, success and intracultural issues involving African
American culture. Often (in her novels) she employs some female characters
who appear to be other than Negro. She is remembered for helping to usher in
the Harlem Renaissance. It seems to me that Fauset is a most misunderstood
writer. Because she is stereotyped as being preoccupied with Black middle-class
culture, folk often dismiss her novels characterizing them as “novels of manners”
and her many female characters are read summarily as innocuous, inoffensive,
fluffy creations who seek to maintain, marry up and attain this lifestyle.

Focusing on her major and secondary female characters in her novels I
will demonstrate her appreciation of language and voice. In W
13.9. for example, Fauset plays with language and voice and exhibits its
relationship to American culture and related Negro intracultural issues. She
pokes fun at a public for characterizing the progeny of miscegeny as having bad
blood. She bestows the surname Strange on a family, in The Chinabeny Tgee,
then throughout the novel she puns on the word strange and invokes it as a trope

to demonstrate the ridiculousness of identifying one as having bad blood. It also

63

becomes a name associated with a woman centered family; a family that was
Strange before Colonel Halloway fathered a daughter with Sarah Strange. The
Strange women are workers and Laurentine, the daughter, wants to be accepted
by the larger black community. Because many critics failed to recognize
Fauset’s knowledge of African American culture, American history, world
literature, manipulation of voice, Anglophile love of language and overt feminist
focus ostensibly, they also missed her use of humor. Chapter three will begin
with observations from various critics from the Harlem Renaissance and beyond
on Fauset and her work. Though not as skilled as Hopkins when creating
characters who speak Ebonics, Fauset also uses African American Vernacular
English (AAVE) speaking characters and pays special attention to slang as a
verbal activity used by middle-class Negroes and a separate linguistic activity
from Ebonic speaking characters. Fauset’s testifyin stance includes language
and word play. Fauset's Strange women must learn and come to terms with their
family history and their community after which one needs to ask if their family is
that removed from other families of Red Brook. The lives of the Strange women
become a testimony to the pressures of nubile single Black women living in
heterosexual society. However, the Strange women are empowered when they
are able to testify to one another and the other women about their emotions,
experiences and men. Fauset’s strength lies in her focus on the roles of women
and her testimony to the multiple relationships among and interdependence of

women’s experiences and consciousness.

In the mid 1980s, Robert Bone proclaimed Fauset’s novels as “uniformly
sophomoric, trivial, and dull” (101). Though one of the most productive writers of
the Harlem Renaissance and a prominent promoter of new literary talent, critical
acknowbdgement escaped Fauset’s novels. Both Fauset and Hopkins were
magazine editors and though prolific in the critical realm they were overlooked or
trivilized. There are many similarities between Hopkins and Fauset. As
mentioned previously, both women wrote novels, short fiction and articles. Both
were editors for magazines that served the Negro community. Both were
concerned with Blacks in the African Diaspora. Both grew up without a biological
parent—Hopkins’ father, Fauset’s mother. Both published four novels; although
technically Hopkins published one novel and three serialized novels. Their works
testify to their ideals related to women’s dignity, freedom, motivations, wage/labor
and relationships.

In chapter two Hopkins is also concerned with representing womanhood
from various points of view and subsequently questioning what is valid
knowledge. Consequently, she recognizes value in folk culture. Hopkins
understood that women were being denied decision making or leadership
positions in governments as well as in businesses and she created in her
literature places where daring women could challenge authority and win.
Listening to the voices from her remaining novels this chapter will focus on how
women’s voices are used to cultivate leadership and heroines. As her narrative
women advance and their testifyin intensifies their link to the nineteenth century

idea of home and hearth wavers.

65

Chapter three finds that overall Fauset is concerned with families and the
plight of the common working woman. She is less assertive and direct in her use
of voice than Hopkins but she is just as effective in rebuking oppressions while
highlighting racism, sexism and classism. While Hopkins uses folk culture,
Fauset constantly reworks the folk tale Cingeglla demonstrating how ridiculous
its premise is for women, particularly Black women. Fauset’s Cinderellas,
however, talk back to the prince and those who think women should marry up the
economic ladder. In Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confineion, there are at least
two versions of Cinderella—one African American the other Euro American.
Fauset’s subversive thematic repetition of Cinderella plays out in all of her novels
and one could ask is she testifyin to the same thang? In LIE Chinagnx Tee
young Malory is engaged to Melissa. Yet in some scenes he is feminized and
even Cinderellized. One man observing Malory thought “the lad whom he didn’t
recognize had a nice open face he noticed—there was something a little
feminine, wornanish about it” (171). His intended wife, Melissa, thought, “Malory,
she knew now positively, was a snob. Not in the ordinary sense” (251). Thus far
he is characterized as an effeminate snob. While enjoying a party at the home of
Gertrude Brown, who unbeknownst to Malory has taken a romantic interest in
him, after hearing that it is half-past eleven, Malory “caught up his hat and
hastened out” (285). The next evening Gertrude recalls “He was at her house
again the next evening, enjoying himself obviously, but at eleven he arose and

with quiet determination announced his intention of leaving” (285). Interestingly,

Malory will be available for marriage. His family does not appear as successful
as Gertrude’s and she has strategized on having him as her beau.
Unquestionably, male critiques devalued the woman centered messages
both Hopkins and Fauset conveyed. Fauset’s failure according to some critics
from the thirties to the seventies is her focus on middle-class settings and values.
They generally want to ignore her feminine convergence. Further, as the literary

editor for M magazine Fauset was industrious giving many Negro writers

ignmq

their first chance in print. Yet her recognition was minimal. Fauset critic and
biographer Carlyn Sylvander notes “W. E. B. DuBois later remembered her only
as ‘a very brilliant colored girl..., who was born in Philadelphia and has written
some lovely firings about Philadelphia Negroes’” (82). Along with other
misconceptions, Fauset was not born a Philadelphia Negro in a middle-class
family—“she was born 27 April 1882 in Camden County, Snow Hill Center
Township, New Jersey”—-such misleading information serves to be dismissive
when some critics combine her work with whom they think she is (Sylvander 23).
In Vlfiien Harlem Was in Vggue, David Levering Lewis maintains that during the
Harlem Renaissance “with the exception of James Weldon Johnson, she
[Fauset] knew a good deal more about the world of literature than the academics
and civil libertarians in Harlem who were becoming overnight experts” (121).
Lewis, however, does point out that “there is no telling what she would have done
had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable efficiency at any
task” (121). Nathan Huggins confidently asserts that “Jessie Fauset delineates

middle-class Negro life, contrives problems to generate stories” (236-237).

67

Nevertheless, if she only concentrated on the black bourgeoisie that is certainly
an area worthy of study.

Some Negro women writers during post Reconstruction and into the
Harlem Renaissance endowed their Negro American poor and working-class
women characters with dialogue that represented a Plantation Creole or dialect.
Some critics believed that Plantation Creole or dialect speaking Negro characters
signaled a character's singular role as comic minstrels, and disregarded any
other substantive insight or comments related to that character. Other critics
simply ignored characters whose speech did not reflect Standard English.
Because of the multiple sociopolitical oppressions and repression that Negro
women fawd I believe it is an insult to dismiss or ignore women characters as
comic when they speak Plantation Creole or occupy an enslaved or wage/labor
position without close examination.

Henderson, in a process she identifies as “speaking in tongues,” asserts
that “black women must speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of
discourses” (22). There are competing and complementary discourses in the
voices of Wilson and Jacobs, but I do not think that they can adjust their timber to
assuage all folk who initially made up their reading public. However, I do believe
that there is within their work places where readers can testify. As I disregard the
limited classification some critics have given to Hopkins and Fauset I see many
places in their novels where I can and will testify.

Much of African American women’s literature in the United States is rooted

within a climate of multiple oppressions, suppressions and repression, and there

68

is an undeniable confrontation of blatant inequality, not only between women and
men but among women in various economic groups as well. Many literary critics
ignored their voices for many years, possibly because their novels reflect the
testimonial discourse to which many critics were unable to bear witness.
However, their novels echo the voices of some women whose stories did not
ordinarily get told. Their novels exhibit the sassiness of Black women in various
classes. Their novels embody a testifyin quality in the oral tradition of African
American culture. Perhaps Hopkins and Fauset, as Black women in the United
States, wrote conveying what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as a Black women’s
standpoint. According to Collins such a standpoint includes core themes and the
interdependence of Black women’s various expressions, experiences,
consciousness and actions when encountering (32). Nonetheless, in their novels
I recognize the voices of women I’ve known.

Hopkins and Fauset’s novels demonstrate the complexity of voice and a
multitude of women’s issues. Additionally, their characters confront or expose
abuses and survive. Therefore, whether they speak in Ebonics, Plantation
Creole, dialect or standard English their characters make statements about the
time in which they lived and to stereotype certain characters because they speak
in other than standard English is to miss out, perhaps, on some important
statements, characters or plots in American literature. The nineteenth-century
women’s narratives and novels of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Jessie Redmon

F auset demonstrate, for me, that there are many women’s voices waiting to be

heard.

69

Notes

 

1 For a detailed description of Truth’s action see: Frances Titus, Narrative of S_qle' umr

Truth: A Bondmernan of Olden Time, Emancjmted 91 the New York Legislature in the Early Part

of the Present Century; with a History of her Labors and Correependence Drawn from her “Book
of Life” (1878; New York: Oxford UP, 1991) 139. Nell Irvin Painter also explicates the event in

 

her study, ngoumer Truth A Lie. A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996) 138-141.

2 For a detailed description of the Celia case see: Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A see
(New York: Avon Books, 1991).

3 The Black English style of marking indicates that one is mimicking the speech of
another person. For further discussion see: Teun A. Van Dijk, Stella Tink-Toomey, Geneva
Smitherrnan and Denise Troutman, “Discourse, Ethnicity, Culture and Racism,” Ciscoug ee
Social Interaction, ed. Teun A. Van Dijk (California: Sage, 1997) 144-180.

4 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (1899; Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1969).

The short story, “Dave’s Neckliss” is not part of Chenutt’s collection, The Conjure Men.

70

Chapter 2
“SASS” CLAIMED TERRAIN OF NARRATIVE WOMEN

Manage your own secrets and divulge them by the silent
language of your own pen.

Mattie Jackson, The Stag of Mattie J. Jagegn

The confrontational communication style of the narrative women in this
chapter are often identified as sass by their oppressors. Whether written by
another, their ghosts writers seem amazed by the manner in which the women
described their conditions or talk back to tyrants. All the narrative women, their
female relatives and fictive kin employ sass in one form or another to
demonstrate self-respect and assert their liberation while simultaneously resisting
the terrorism, perversions, and degradations of United States slavery during the
antebellum period. In short, when the women exercised their inclination and
ability to speak to those in power they were often perceived as sassy or
threatening. Traditionally, for a member of the ruling culture to designate a
woman’s word or behavior as sassy served to dismiss or silence her message,
victimized the woman and concomitantly sexualized her. In American culture
sassy Black women are stereotyped as masculine and sexually aggressive.
Sassy behavior fed into the fallacy of the domineering black woman who
emasculates men; further, this assertive act connects African American women
in the racist American psyche to the Mammy, Jezebel or Sapphire mythology.

The Mammy figure is past her sexual prime and her sass becomes one of her

71

endearing qualities. The Jezebel figure is perceived as sassy and insatiable.
Sapphire is the know-it-all shrew who consumes her spouse with sass. The use
of sass by black women hardly justifies the associated sexual connotations.‘
Moreover, sass for the narrative women is an obligatory and liberating act.

The narrative women understood the labeling and the backlash that
accompanied their sassy articulations. In the extreme, a slave’s resistant act
could be answered with the death of the insurgent or disobedient slave. For F
example, a 1705 amendment to Virginia’s slave code of 1689 states: I“

And if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his

or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in

such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master,

owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be

free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if

such accident had never happened (A. Higginbotham 1978, 50).
The 1705 amendment acknowledges that the murder of a resisting or run away
slave was an accepted (albeit extreme) legal penalty enfomd by the master or
her or his agent. By the antebellum period a slave was well acquainted with the
issuance of punishment if she or he was accused, suspected of or actually
committed a crime or a minor infraction. Therefore, when the following
nineteenth century women employ sass it was with the knowledge that some
form of punishment would surely follow.

The magnitude of sass in early Black women’s autobiographies provides

revealing aspects, according to Joanne Braxton. Her investigation reveabd that

72

sass is associated with the female trickster and that it is a word of West African
derivation (31). It is also connected to witches. As mentioned in the Introduction
the word’s origin is connected to a “sassy tree.” Braxton points out that
A decoction of the bark of this tree was used in West Africa as an
ordeal poison in the trial of accused witches, women spoken of as

being wives of Exu, the trickster god. In her 1893 mm,

-..:

Amanda Smith, an independent black missionary, wrote: “I don’t

. at .

know as any one has ever found what the composition of this sassy
wood really is; but I am told it is a mixture of certain barks. They
say that it is one of their medicines that they used for punishing
witches so you cannot find out what it is. The accused had two
gallons to drink. If she throws it up, she has gained her case.” So,
obviously, “sass” can kill (31)?
Sass is a potent aspect of the female trickster figure and is associated with
female conjuration. According to Braxton, former and fugitive women slaves
used “her tools of liberation include sass and invective as well as biblical
invocation: language is her first line of defense” (16). Presumably the word
“sassy” comes from West Africa. There seems to be a relationship between the
women’s act of sass and traditions and rituals in West Africa. In the antebellum
American South many members of the ruling class attempted to inhibit sassy
women by repressing their sass with legal threats, imprisonment, stripes, and
other forms of mutilations to their bodies and spirits. The history of Afiican

American women’s voices in America literature is connected to violence and is

73

often muffled by a tradition of silence. When the women invoke sass they are
participating in an oral tradition passed on through generations.

Whether the narratives were written by themselves or an amanuensis, the
sassy focal women emerge as hopeful, self-assertive and rebellious. These
women demonstrate that there was a limit to what and how far they would submit
their will, allegiance and obedience to mortal masters and institutions. The fact
that the women were able to tell their version of herstory and respond to a
system that literally, physically, psychologically, socially, economically and
spiritually silenced them (temporarily) reminds one of the spiritual work of the
ancestor. The ancestor is not separate from the word and both are forces.3 Like
the ancestor, the reissue of their narratives indicates they were never quite gone.
And like the phoenix, the magnitude and strength of sass can reemerge. Sassy
women speak for many. The insurgent power of the women’s sass echoes from
the pages of their narratives. Notably the pen of an amanuensis in the narratives
of Picquet, Elizabeth, Veney and Jackson can not contain the flair and spirit of

their sass.

The opening epigraph, taken from The Story of Mattie J. Jafln, is a
compelling statement that invites a reader to interpret or reinterpret clues
contained in her narrative. A curious reader is haunted by Jackson’s cryptic
riddle in an attempt to discover, decode or unlock her secrets. A reader can infer
that Jackson’s secrets are disguised through some type of linguistic code.
Jackson Indicates that she is not the only person who has secrets. She

confidently makes her declaration not to an objective third person audience but to

74

second person others. Jackson advises others to be cryptic in revealing their
“secrets” within narratives. However, when Jackson mentions silence she is
probably referring to what Toni Cade Bambara refers to as untalk.
To clarify untalk, Old folks are articulate masters. Their silences
crash glass. And don’t let Grandma cut her eye...intemal blwding.
And please don’t let her hum. When we were real little we learned
to read with geiger counter accuracy the language of the body and
the language of silence. And we became bone-deep sensitive to
the channels language operates within, a fact which makes many
verbal statements, frequently, redundant If not foolish (Bambara
337)
The silence that Jackson refers suggests the multiple levels to whom she directs
her nanative. Jackson claims agency over her voice and suggests multiple
meanings advising others to do the same. Ironically, Jackson does not write her
own story; yet she is confident that her voice will reach the intended audiences.
The use of sass in the narratives is political and symbolic.

Born a slave circa 1846 in Missouri, Mattie Jackson, a Black women,
escaped slavery and was able to tell her story. My assumption is that Jackson’s
secrets had to do with resisting the machinations of American slavery that served
to humiliate, degrade and dehumanize enslaved Blacks, and specifically, women.
Jackson signals other Black women who are resisting racial repression. Other
narrative women with similar backgrounds or experiences may be key to

unlocking the secrets of Jackson and her second person others.

75

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines secret as “done,
made, or conducted without the knowledge of others. kept from general
knowledge. carrying out activities in a manner that prevents them from being
observed or detected.” Louisa Picquet, Elizabeth, Mattie Jackson, Bethany
Veney, Kate Drumgoold, Lucy Delaney, and Susie King Taylor all participated in
personal narrative activities (constructed their stories by writing it themselves,
through an interview format or using an amanuensis) that divulged secrets.
Tables 1 and 2, found on the preceding two pages, outline the narratives referred
to in this chapter. Although the majority of the women begin their lives enslaved,
by law, they were free in spirit. One can get a sense of their unshackled spirits
through an examination of vernacular performances found in their narratives.
Although Jackson claims that she has enclosed secrets in her narrative, her
voice and the voice of her mother resonate with the words of wit, ridicule and
revolution toward those that enslaved and oppressed them. Often Jackson’s
loquaciousness appears so direct one imagines that her secrets are connected to
her style of communication. “Within the African-American community in the
United States, verbal acts also function to save face as they address multiple
audiences, some aware and some unaware, through camouflaging” (Morgan
257). At the same time that Jackson is being sassy she employs indirection.
Marcyliena Morgan points out that “most non-African Americans were unaware”
that Blacks “resisted rules which governed how they talked in public by adapting

indirect language and communication system(s) inherited from Africa” (256).

76

TABLE 1

Seven Womm's Narratives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAME BIRTH NARRATIVE TITLE YEAR AUTHOR
Pill
LOUISA PICQUE T, THE OCTOROON: Rev. H.
Louisa Picquet 18303 A TALE OF SOUTHERN LIFE 1861 Mattison
ME MOIR OF OLD ELIZABETH,
Elizabeth 1766 A COLORED WOMAN 1883 Amanuensis
THE STORY OF MA TTIE J. JACKSON:
HER PARENTAGE-EXPERIENCE OF
EIGHTEEN YEARS IN SLA VERY—
INCIDEN TS DURING THE WAR- Dr. L. S.
Mattie Jackson 1846? HER ESCAPE. A TRUE STORY 1866 Thompson
THE NARRATIVE OF BE THANY VENE Y
Bethany Veney 1818? A SLAVE WOMAN 1889 Amanuensie?
FROM THE DARKNESS COME TH THE
LIGHT OR STRUGGLES FOR CIRCA
Lucy A. Delaney 1827? FREEDOM 1891 SELF
A SLAVE GIRL‘S STORY BEING AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF KATE
Kate Drunrgoold 1860? DRUMGOOLD 1898 SELF
REMINISCENCES OF MY LIFE IN
CA MP
Aug 6, WITH THE 33RD COLORED TROOPS
Susie King Taylor 1848 LATE 131' SC. VOLUNTEERS 1902 SELF

 

 

 

 

 

 

77

 

TAIL. 2

Selim Wraa's Narratives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAME BIRTH REASON FOR WRITINO STATUS OCCUPATION
STATE
Cook, Sex
Worker,
South Raise Money to Free Nurse, Domestic,
Louisa Picqget Carolina Mother Freed Laundress
Field Worker,
Elizabeth Maryland Encouragflthers Slave? Preeclier
To Get An Education And
To Help The Newly 'I-Ieavy Work,”
Mattie Jackson Missouri Emancipated Escaped Laundress
Blacksmith's
Assistant, Log
Tell A Story of Slavery, Hauler,
And Deepen Sense of Laundrees,
Responsibility Toward A Domestic and
Wronged and Persecuted Field
Bethany Veney Virginia Race Freed Worker
Won
Freedom Laundress,
Lucy A. Delaney Missouri To Tell Her Story (lawsuit) Seamstress
Escaped—
Old after Eman-
Kate Wold Virgina To Encourage Others cipation Domestic
Make Public Aware of
Contributions of Black Company
Women and Men to the Laundress,
3m Ta Civil War Egg-Pod Nurse, Teacher

 

78

 

One should know indirection “encompassed multiple audiences, layers of
understanding, and concomitant multiple subjectivities. It may not have survived
and been adapted, were it not for dominant Southern society’s insistent
communication and language monitoring of African Americans. ..it is the
foundation of all African-American discourse” (Morgan 258). Moreover, the
same verbal aggression takes place in the nanatives of the other women in this
chapter.

The following narratives of seven formerly enslaved African American
women with similar backgrounds—Dom into US. slavery, and most of whom
were from the South—are used to decipher the secrets to which Jackson alludes
in the opening epigraph. In order of publication, one narrative was published
before the beginning of the Civil War—Louisa Pieguet, The Octoroon: A Tab of
Centfim Life, (1861);-one during the Civil War—Memoir fl Old Elizamjn, A
qugregflernen, (1863)—one was published during Reconstruction—Mg
ef Mme J. Jeckson: ...A True Stonr, (1886)— and the remaining four (including
the only autobiographies of this group) were published during the Progressive
Era— The NaM‘ e of Betheny Veney A Slave Woman, 1889; Lucy A. Cele—nee}
From rm Darkw Cgmeth m Lighr or mggfi for Frflom, circa 1891; Kate
Drumgoold A Sleire Cirl’e Story Ceing An Autobiegranhy of Kate Drumgoolg
(1898); and Susie King Taylor’s, Reminiscenfi of m Life In Camp with rte 33'"
WW (1902).

In To Tell A Free Stonr, Vlfilliam Andrews finds that “The most reliable

slave narrative would be one that seemed purely mimetic, in which the self is on

79

the periphery instead of at the center of attention, looking outside not within,
transcribing rather than interpreting a set of objective facts” (6). He states,
“American aesthetic standards of the time made a black narrative that exposed
the institutional facts of slavery preferable to one that expressed the subjective
views of an individual slave” (6). As a result Negro nanators had to discover a
way to reveal their “secrets” of self and survival to an overall reading public that

was primarily interested in the gory details of the institution, not in persons who

‘ A ? ‘TEWir-i... .q

experienced the terrorism of bondage. Many scholars of slave narrat'Nes
maintain that the narrators of such works divulged subjective aspects of “self”
through signification that, in this chapter, is occasionally played out through the
women’s use of sass.

Reverend H. Mattison, Louisa Picquet’s amanuensis, was obviously
impressed with her physical appearance. He describes her as “...easy and
graceful in her manners, of fair complexion and rosy cheeks, with dark eyes a
flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl, and every appearance,
at first view, of an accomplished white lady” (5). Those fooled by her appearance
will be convinced otherwise when, according to Mattison, she is engaged in
conversation. The listener will discover that:

A certain menial-like diffidence, her plantation expression and
pronunciation, her inability to read or write, together with her
familiarity with and readiness in describing plantation scenes and

sorrows, all attest the truthfulness of her declaration that she has

80

been most of her life a slave. Besides, her artless simplicity and
sincerity are sufficient to dissipate the last doubt (5).
He finds Picquet appealing, even lady-like, until she opens her mouth and
speaks. Moreover, when she speaks she appears intent to recall her days as a
slave. Once he establishes that Picquet is of African descent he characterizes
her as a Christian woman—not a lady. Ostensibly, as a result of her ready
conversational topic ladyhood escapes her and she is relegated to womanhood.

 

Mattison apparently did not view Picquet as a rebellious individual or a threat in
any way. Nevertheless, this shy, illiterate, unassuming vocal woman
successfully campaigned to find and free her enslaved mother through
publication of her narrative, travel and solicitation of funds from individuals and
groups in various states.

As Picquet condemned slavery, themes of sexuality, intraracial division
and a slave woman’s morality emerge. When able, she asserts that her
exposure to Biblical teachings caused her to accept beatings as an option to sex
with her second master.

Mattison, however, is preoccupied with morality, sexuality and complexion as
salient points to condemn slavery. Mattison offers the moral of Picquet’s
narrative:

There is not a family mentioned, from first to last, that does not reek
with fornication and adultery. It turns up as naturally, and is
mentioned with as little specialty, as walrus beef in the narrative of
the Arctic Expedition, or macaroni in a tour of ltaly....if such are the

81

glimpses of southern domestic life which a single brief narrative
reveals, what must the remainder be, which is hidden from our
“Abolition” eyes? Alas for those telltale mulatto, and quadroon, and
octoroon faces! They stand out unimpeached, and still augmenting
as God‘s testimony to the deep moral pollution of the Slave States
(51).
Mattison responded to the sexual abuses involved in Southern slavery.
Primarily, it appears, he had a few areas of concern; he is morally outraged by
“fornication and adultery” that existed in Southern slavery, moral degradation
violated God’s plan and thus could justify the North’s participation in the Civil
War, for example. Picquet is not as outraged by the sinful behavior of
Southerners. For example, after Picquet and her mother are sold to Mr. Cook in
Georgia she described her mother as having,”’...a little baby sister when we first
went to Mobile...She died in Alabama. She had one before that, while she was
in Georgia; but they all died but me and my brother, the oldest and the youngest’”
(7). Subsequently, Picquet tells Mattison that her mother did not have a husband
or “one she called her husband,” while living in Georgia or Mobile. When asked
who was the father of the babies, Picquet states: “’I don’t know, except Mr. Cook
was. Mother had three children while Mr. Cook owned her'” (8). Picquet
exhibited no remorse or shame that her mother gave birth to children outside of
mdlock. Toward the close of the nanative Mattison contended, “Louise’s mother
never would take the name of Randolph or Cook—the name of her owner—as

other slaves do, so she still sticks to her first name of Ramsey, as when she lived

82

in South Carolina thirty-five years ago” (31). Picquet reads Mattison and a
public that agrees with him. She finds his question accusatory and inappropriate.
The previous point seemingly was significant for Picquet more than for Mattison.
Ostensibly, Picquet is proud that her mother did not align herself, in name, to two
masters who sexually violated her. Additionally, by refusing to assume their
names Elizabeth (Picquet’s mother) intentionally resisted her masters’
objectification of her. Elizabeth also demonstrates the importance of self-identity.
It is clear to a reader that Picquet and Mattison’s objectives differed. As an
individual characterized as menial, Picquet's voice seems clear and at times so
potent the narrative becomes an interview—her response to him. Consequently,
a reader responds to Picquet with“! hear you.”

Picquet’s and her mother’s voices manage to breakout of Mattison’s
narrative construct. Picquet‘s narrative established that she and her mother were
not concerned with female Christian morality when it involved black women in
slavery. Her mother’s freedom is listed as Picquet's reason for the book's
publication and that is the goal to which the concluding portions of the book are
devoted. Dogged determination allows her story to be told and to come through
the filter of an amanuensis. Although Mattison describes her one way at the
beginning of the narrative, by the end Picquet is not a passive frwd former slave
but an activist Louisa Picquet is an intelligent woman with memories and a
voice that recalls and answers the evils of slavery. Picquet refuses to allow her
voice to become camouflaged as she was determined that her attitudes and

beliefs be known. She ultimately gains another sense of satisfaction because

83

fl? ‘Tm

she is able to secure her mother’s freedom and live with her family knowing that
her story is one that will live on as part of history's book.

One way in which the voices of Elizabeth’s and Picquet’s stories break
from Mattison is in a description of their sexuality and sexual terrorism. Because
it existed outside of Christian values they did not, evidently, suffer moral shame.
Picquet is portrayed as a religious woman. Their actions indicamd that their
bodies were owned by others but their minds and voices were their own.
Picquet, though forwd to live with her enslavers, identified only one man as her
husband, “’Tlrree years after I came there [Cincinnati, Ohio], I married Mr.
Picquet, my husband’” (25). Picquet did not see her mother for over twenty
years. When she contacted her mother, Elizabeth was enslaved and married.
Elizabeth did not take on the surname of her husband and, with his blessing, is
willing to leave her unnamed husband for a life of freedom with her daughter. It
seemed that by not assuming the surname of men, Elizabeth was attempting to
leave a type of matrilineal trail, while simultaneously subverting patriarchy in her
own way. Mattison, it seems, is preoccupied with his motives in writing her
narrative and views Picquet passive, redundant, violated and illiterate; however,
Picquet is able, for the most part, to convey the story she wants and achieve her
intended goal.

In 1863, Elizabeth’s scribe failed to provide the reader with her last name,
but did see fit to preface her name with “Old,” reinforcing the tradition of
introducing the names of black slaves and other American blacks with “Aunty,”

“Uncle,” or “Mammy’ for example. Elizabeth will forever be known in print as Old

Elizabeth. “Old” Elizabeth implies a less vigorous voice. In 1889, Veney’s
amanuensis, likewise, titles her narrative Aunt me Stern. “Aunt” Betty
suggests a humble and agreeable Black servant woman. Furthermore, the title
indicates that Betty’s story is told by another. Nevertheless, Elizabeth’s unknown
amanuensis is less intrusive than Reverend Mattison. Elizabeth’s amanuensis
prefaces her memoir with a succinct statement: “In the following Narrative of ‘Old if
Elizabeth,’ which was taken from her own lips in her 97'’1 year, her simple E
language has been adhered to as strictly as was consistent with perspicuity and E”
propriety” (3). Propriety is a curious word to associate with the life of an
enslaved then freed black woman evangelist who serrnonized from the early
1800s to the early 1860s. I suppose Elizabeth’s possible use of Plantation
Creole (“simple language”) was at times confusing to her ghost writer. The ghost
writer should be credited with making Elizabeth appear lucid and adhering to
standards of proper behavior. Nevertheless, Elizabeth with Christ's authority
and, therefore, an anointed voice confronts a watchman (police officer), squire,
and ministers (black and white) to preach a message of freedom and
deliverance. For example she described an incident that occurred in Virginia
(note the mingling of voices—Elizabeth and the amanuensis):
The people there would not believe that a coloured woman could
preach. And moreover, as she had no learning, they strove to
imprison me because I spoke against slavery: and being brought
up, they asked by what authority I spake? and if I had been

85

ordained? I answered, not by the commission of men’s hands: if

the Lord had ordained me, I needed nothing better (17).
Although she lacked what was considered the proper credentials to preach, she
pushed others to the limit with her voice when she, probably, invoked some
religious teaching to support her stand against slavery. Elizabeth’s voice
demonstrates her spiritual direction, fearless conviction and strength of purpose.
Concurrently with Elizabeth’s sass, I assume, was her ability to loud talk.‘ As a
Black women evangelist alone, without the support of ordained men, I believe
she had to appropriate the intended pitch when needed, attract hearers, and use
her pitch, timing and voice to demonstrate and reinforce God’s calling. For a
tirrre, Elizabeth was owned by a Presbyterian who believed in slavery but not in
holding slaves for life. She states, “Having served him faithfully my time out, he
gave me my liberty, which was about the thirtieth year of my age” (8). I suspect
that Elizabeth was in service and indoctrinated to the religious beliefs of this man
for over ten years. Even provisionally, Elizabeth was not convinced that human
commerce was acceptable.

Elizabeth’s voice offers strength and power to an individual who lacks self-
confidence and power. “Black, elderly, female, unmarried, and childless,
Elizabeth might seem at first glance to have been among the most
disadvantaged and powerless people of the antebellum era” (Andrews xxxii). As
a child, she was separated from her family. The trauma of her situation caused
Elizabeth to will herself to die. She experienced an epiphany (at the age of
twelve) and leamd that she was supposed to teach the gospel. She ignored the

86

mew for thirty years. At the age of forty-two she pondered, “As I could read
but little, I questioned within myself how it would be possible for me to deliver the
message, when I did not understand the Scriptures” (9). She added,
'Whereupon l was moved to open a Bible...and my eyes fell upon this passage,
‘Gird up thy loins now like a man, and answer thou me. Obey God rather than
man,” (9). She sought the advice of “religious professor[s]” who discouraged her
from becoming an evangelist because she was a woman. “Men in the church
expected women, especially almost illiterate former slam like Elizabeth, to keep
silent and not presume to speak for God to them” (Andrews )oorvi).
Consequently, “I returned to the Lord, feeling that I was nothing, and knew
nothing, and wrestled and prayed to the Lord that He would fillly reveal His will,
and make the way plain” (9). Once convinced that she was performing God’s
work “she displayed remarkable courage as a minister of the social gospel”
(Andrews rectvii). She had to speak with confidence. William Andrews identifies
Elizabeth’s narrative as one of the earliest accounts “we have of successful black
career women in nineteenth-century America” (roorvii). He adds that, “by
identifying with her divine mission, Elizabeth developed a profound self-respect
that brooked no opposition and accepted no compromise” (xrowii). Elizabeth’s
message, in narrative form and as an evangelist, was that one can accomplish
any goal, despite masters or other hindrances or hardships if one maintains and
cultivates faith in God.
Interestingly, M.W.G. regrets “that the language and personal

characteristics of Bethany cannot be transcribed. The little particulars that give

87

coloring and point, tone and expression, are largely lost. Only the outline can be
given” (Many Veney Preface). What remains, according to M.W.G., is a
”plain, unvamished tale, . . . ‘” (Preface). All the recorders respond to the
language and intonation of the women’s words. One gets more of a sense of the
power of a nanative women’s voice and how it emerges in a text with Mattie
Jackson.

Mattie Jackson’s story was arranged and written by Dr. L. S. Thompson
formerly Mrs. Schuyler. Dr. Thompson and Jackson shared a more intimate
relationship than the other narrative women who employed scriveners. Jackson
states, “I had previously told my step-mother my story, and how often my own
mother had wished she could have it published. I did not imagine she could find
time to write and arrange it, but she immediately proposed writing and publishing
the entire story, . . . “ (36). Although obvious class differences existed between
Ellen (Mattie’s mother) and Dr. Thompson (Mattie’s step—mother) all the women
shared and recognized the importance of Jackson’s story and conceivably the
significance of sass. Possibly it is the collective spiritual force of the women and
the legacy of the ancestor that allows this narrative to come across as the
sassiest of the four written by others.

In IE Ctonr of Merrie Jackson, when a newspaper picture of President
Lincoln was discovered in Ellen’s room (Mattie’s mother) by her master, “He
asked her what she was doing with old Lincoln’s picture. She replbd it was there
because she liked it. He then knocked her down three times, and sent her to the
trader’s yard for a month as punishment” (14). This was not the first time that her

88

master had punched or sent her to the trader’s yard. As a house slave, Ellen had
kept silent when her mistress railed against Lincoln, the Civil War and “niggers.”
Well aware of the consequences of her sassy retort, Ellen maintained her self-
imposed right to her opinion (notably in this Situation, in a room she possibly
recognized as her own) and seemingly responded in a direct and honest manner
to her owner. The masked or indirect focus of this exchange is politics. Lincoln’s
picture signifies a political stance against slavery. The indirect exchange is
directed toward a Black audience—those who can overhear the exchange
between Ellen and master and “within the system of repression, the
counterlanguage [in this instance sass] provided a vehicle for face-work and
protected and confirmed the existence of the antisociety [Black]. It constituted
speaker agency so that the act of talking was potentially political and highly
symbolic” (Morgan 256). Ellen reveals her political position in an atmosphere
where slavery is practiced, intentionally challenging and defying one of its
practitioners with her sass. However, the master can not allow Ellen agency to
think and make her own decisions. He undoubtedly heard her sassin but to
attribute her ability to talk politics and have a point of view directly with him would
indicate she assumed responsibility as a speaker, that she formulated intentions
as a thinking human being and that she participates in a complex system of
communication understanding that audiences change—from master to peers.

In addition, Ellen performed sassy deeds. For example, she helped her
first husband escape and finally succeeded in escaping slavery on her seventh

attempt. Ellen’s continuously resistant behavior served as an example for her

89

children and others that self-respect, justice and freedom are ongoing battles that
the enslaved must repeatedly claim.

In 1861, Union soldiers had moved into Missouri and freedom loving
slaves were pleased at their much anticipamd and prayed for legal emancipation.
Mattie stated, “The days of sadness [the Civil War] for mistress were days of joy
for us” (15). She does not separate herself from her community. Mattie’s sass
articulates a collective affimration and invites her reader to talk-back or rather
participate in this collective consciousness. Like her mother who honestly
responded to her master’s query about Lincoln’s picture, Mattie’s narrative
observation invites her audience to say “Amen” in agreement with her insight and
use of poetic cadence or close the book on her impertinence.

Like her mother, Ellen, Mattie challenged authority when she believed it
was unjust. According to Mattie, the mistress had a particularly “bad day” and
decided to end it with Mattie being whipped. The mistress selected a switch and
placed it in a corner until her husband’s return (so he could whip Mattie). Mattie
states, “As I was not pleased with the idea of a whipping I bent the switch in the
shape of W, which was the first letter of his name, and after I had attended to the
dining room my fellow servant and myself walked away and stopped with an aunt
of mine during the night” (15). Although Mattie’s tone is matter-of-fact, such a
defiant act carried severe consequences. One notes that after her sass, Mattie
neither fled the house in fear nor does she argue with her mistress about a

situation that Mattie judged unjust. Further, she and a “fellow servant” go visiting.
Mattie endorsed her self-worth and confronted the legality of slave illiteracy when

she signifies her ability to read. By forming the switch into the letter “W” Mattie
sassed a public that supported a law that made it illegal to teach a slave to read.
On another level, by forming the switch into the shape of a ”W” Mattie symbolized
her ability to “read the situation” by, as she states, bending the switch into the
first letter of her master’s name, William. Her act was meant to provoke.

Mattie was punished thme weeks later when the mistress “flew into a rage
and told him (the master) l was saucy, and to strike me, and he immediately gave
me a severe blow with a stock ofwood, which inflicted a deep wound upon my
head” (18). William continued to beat Mattie and was stopped by Ellen’s physical
intervention—another sassy deed.

Sass should not be read as simply a female challenge to male authority.
Such a perception diminishes the tenor of the women’s words and nurtures a
sexual connotation of sass that contributes to stereotypes of black women as
Mammies, Jezebels and Sapphires. Sass struck a chord with oppressors, I
believe, because it was used by women who were supposed to be hopeless,
docile and submissive. Sass is the public and private resistant and revolutionary
acts of black women, enslaved or free, articulating their thoughts, often intentions
(indirectly) and occasionally disagreements to white authority figures. Utilization
of sass simultaneously indicates their wit, self-respect and pride. The worrren,
ranked as chattel by the ruling class, use sass to defy white supremacy. Often
when employing sass the women do not hide behind their gender. Sass
rapresents “verbal rituals from the oral tradition and the continued importance of
the word as in African cultures” (Smitherrnan 1998, 207). The women

91

recognized the power of the word and they are described in this paper as sassy
because as black bondwomen or freewomen during the antebellum period they
use their experience, knowledge, familial and communal connections, spirituality
and ancestral influences to articulate their self-acknowledged liberties to a ruling
society that incorporated all its resources—legal, religious, economic, political
and social—to combat and convince the women, their swartlry families and dusky
communities otherwise.

One should consider the responses created by the women’s sassy
actions. Whether physical performance or invoking word necromancy, sass is
always an act designed to produce a transformation. Unmistakably facial and
body movements are as significant to sass as the tone or pitch of the words that
the women call forth. As M. W. G. states many personal characteristics cannot
be transcribed; therefore, one must imagine the use of related or contrary
motions as the women conjured their words.

In The Negetue‘ g wen! Veney, A Cleve Wman, after being subjected
to the violence of several masters including being sold away from her daughter,
Bethany Veney responds in a sassy manner when she Ieams of the insolvency of
her current master. Veney decides that she would never be sold again. She
thinks, “I would take my child and hide in the mountains. I would do anything
sooner than I would be sold” (35). She makes preparations for escape and when
her employer confirmed that her master’s property is to be auctioned she

announmd, “’I won’t be sold. He shall never find me, to sell me again,” I angrily

cried” (35). When Veney, whose mother died when she was nine years-old,

92

decides that she will not be sold, she sought and received advice from “an old
negro woman [about] certain tricks I could resort to, when placed upon the stand,
that would be likely to hinder my sale” (30). Raboteau states, “Elderly people are
respected and revered in part because they preserve the memory of the dead
and are closer chronologically to the ancestor” (12). Veney, undoubtedly,
understood other ways of knowing or rather “. . .tlre interrelationship of knowledge
with cosmology, society, religion, medicine, and traditions...” that was associated
with an elder (Asante 184). Having executed the instructions of the old Negro
woman, Veney mounted the auction block. She recalls:
...tlre doctor, who was employed to examine the slaves on such
occasions, told me to let him see my tongue, he found it coated and
feverish, and turning from me with a shiver of disgust, said he was
obliged to admit that at that moment I was in a very bilious
condition. One after another of the crowd felt of my limbs, asked
me all manner of questions, to which I replied in the ugliest manner
I dared; and when the auctioneer raised his hammer, and cried,
“How much do I hear for this woman?” the bids were so low I was
ordered down from the stand, (30).
Veney is made a public spectacle but she controls the performance. Through the
old Negro woman’s knowledge of herbs they (the old woman and Veney)
objectified the gaze of perspective buyers and deprive Veney’s master from his

intended profit; thus allowing Veney to keep her vow.

93

Kate Drumgoold’s master sought to keep former slaves ignorant
concerning their emancipation. Nevertheless, Kate’s mother (previously sold
away from her children) regained custody of Kate and her older sister by having
them met her later in the day. Kate remembers:

He, Mr. House, did not want us to go, and I took my oldest sister
and marched out to go where mother was and he did not like that
freedom, and hatred tofind which wastlratwe had gonetothe
place, but he did not find us, and we had been to the place where
the people were that had homes, and that they would kill us at first
sight, and that was all that I wanted to see, and I did not find one
thing true of their sayings” (sic, 7):"
Kate equates her sassy behavior to freedom. Although Kate probably
disbelieved many of the fabrications her master and mistress told their former
slaves, in an attempt to persuade them to stay, her suspicion was justified when
she joined her mother and sister in freedom and discovemd that the maple in
homes did not kill them. Further, when Kate’s mother was informed that the rest
of her children, who were at various locations, were dead “she said that she
would go and dig up their bones” (9). As a result of the mother’s perseverance
she was able to claim all of her children. Sassy persistence excoriates lies to
reveal facts and provide renewal.
The reader is again exposed to a sassy mother and daughter in Lucy A.
Delaney‘s autobiography. When Delaney”s father is sold, her mother, Polly
Crocket, “...registered a solemn vow that her children should not continue in

slavery all their lives, and she never spared an opportunity to impress it upon us,
that we must get our freedom whenever the chance offered” (15-16). Crocket
had two daughters, Lucy and Nancy. Nancy escapes while the mistress
honeymoons in Niagara Falls. When Polly is told of Nancy’s escape, Lucy
remembers, “Mother was very thankful, and in her heart arose a prayer of
thanksgiving, but outwardly she pretended to be vexed and angry. Oh! the
impenetrable mask of these poor black creatures! How much of joy, of sorrow, of
misery and anguish have they hidden from their tonnentorsl” (18). Lucy’s
youthful recollection embodies the dual nature of signifying qualities and makes
her audience aware of indirection as a common rhetorical activity of blacks in
bondage.

The following circumstances between Polly and her mistress and master
personifies the lore of signifyin Brer Rabbit’s escape from Brer Fox and the Tar-
Baby.“ The mistress threatened to sell Polly down river, Polly told her mistress
”she didn’t care, she was tired of that place, and didn’t like to live there, nohow”
(21). Polly’s sass “infuriated Mr. Cox who cried ‘How dare a negro say what she
liked or what she did not like”; and he would show her what he should do” (21).
Polly seems to stress to Lucy that she must simultaneously understand her goal
and audience. Consequently, Polly is sold; she escapes, is returned, sues for
her freedom and wins her independence.

Lucy, meanwhile, is just as sassy as her mother, Polly. For example, Lucy
informs her mistress “”You have no business to whip me. I don’t belong to you’”

(26). Lucy knows she is in bondage; however, her sense of justice, self-respect

95

and frwdom obligate her sassy responses. Sass is a psychological utility
employed by the women to incite, inflame, and agitate the powerful to recognize
and respect the will of the perceived powerless. (Numerous examples of this
exist in the trickster tales.) Lucy’s sassy act caused her mistress to justify her
violent reaction. Lucy states,

...and when I thus spoke, saucily, I must confess, she [the

mistress] opened her eyes in angry amazement and cried:

“You do belong to me, for my papa left you to me in his will,

...you ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk so to one that you

have been raised with; ...” (28).
Lucy’s sass compels her mistress to sell her. The mistress tells her husband,
“’Mr. Mitchell, I will not have that saucy baggage around this house, for if she
finds you won’t whip her, there will be no living with her, so you shall just sell her,
and I insist upon it’” (28). Following in her mother’s sassy footprints, and
because a slave legally followed the condition of her or his mother, Lucy also
successfully sues for her freedom.

Susie King Taylor begins her academic education with the help of a group
of free, sassy African American women who impudently defy the law and educate
young black children. Taylor's grandmother, Dolly, arranges for Taylor and her
brother to learn how to read and write from Mrs. Woodhouse in 1858, Savannah,
Georgia. The students (approximately 25 to 30) wrap their books in paper, “to
Prevent the police or white persons from seeing them,” and enter Mrs.
Woodhouse’s home one at a time, assisted by her daughter, Mary Jane (5).

According to Taylor, neighbors thought they were Ieaming a trade “as it was the
custom to give children a trade of some kind” (5). The students left the same
way they entered—one at a time. After two years with Mrs. Woodhouse, Taylor
(in a sense) graduates to Mrs. Mary Beasley’s tutelage, until May, 1860.

Taylor uses her training to benefit her community and later the country.
She stated, “I often wrote passes for my grandmother, for all colored persons,
free or slaves, were compelled to have a pass; free colored people having a
guardian in place of a master” (7). Taylor’s description of how she obtains her
early education demonstrates how an oppressed community masked their
opportunities. The slave community knew about and surreptitiously took
advantage of educating their children.

For example, Taylor’s teachers taught while disregarding possible threats
to their freedom with further bondage or death. They respond to a divine
purpose (to enlighten the future generation) and not profane slave codes
(designed to perpetuate the ignorance of slaves). Is the ordeal of sass liberation
or death? Metaphorically, Taylor's community of women provide a mutable
barrier that separated the divine world of education to the profane world of
bondage.

The spiritual and familial connections were so passionate, powerful and
prophetic that the ironhand of the legal, social, psychological, and cultural terrors
failed to convince the women to submit to a ubiquitous principle or implied natural
duty that dictated that they disregard personhood or self-respect for themselves

and their community. In both a religious and secular setting women employed

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sass. Sass certainly was not an act that was reinforced or considered
acceptable by white America’s ruling culture. Relatedly, in her study Clerre
WM, Barbara Bush points out that enslaved Black
women used sass as a means of resistance. For example Bush maintained,
“Whip or no whip, a significant proportion of women slaves continued to risk the
wrath of their white masters, most commonly by refusing to work and engaging in
verbal abuse and insolence” (60). Sassy resistance is not unique to Black
women in the United States.

Enslaved Africans and consequently African American slaves often had to
transfigure or refashion West or Central African traditions and culture to their
existence in the New World. Creolization contributed to the specific ways that
women resisted oppression and achieved (at least) some psychological relief. In
W for example, Melville Herskovits found that the
tradition of indirection was well integrated in African culture from upper class to
ordinary folk. He states it is, “...essential that this tradition of indirection be
regarded as a carry-over of aboriginal culture” (156). African oral traditions,
trickster tales, songs, proverbs, dance influenwd African Americans faith in the
power of the word or nommo (Foster 17). According to Frances Smith Foster in
W faith in the power of the word comes “from sources religious
and secular, African and American” (16). The familial and ancestral influences in
the narratives provide other examples of creolization and resistance. Clearly, the

women’s use of sass during the antebellum period explored power relationships.

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Among peers or members of the dominant culture its use held different meaning
and elicited different responses.

Perhaps It is the unarticulated belief in the long-gone ancestor that
compels the narrative women to flirt with death when they employ sass. In death
they join with their ancestors. Sass then becomes a win, win situation—they
reinforce their self-respect and sense of justice and the possibility that they will
join with their watchful ancestors. In many of the nanatives, sass is often
performed by a senior member of the family or community.

The ancestors seem to operate in a spiritual and indirect way in the
narratives. For example, in the mid to late eighteenth century eleven year-old
Elizabeth is ripped from her immediate family. Longing to see her mother she
escapes. Before she is forced to return to the new farm Elizabeth’s mother
advises her that she had “’nobody in the wide world to look to but God’” (4).
Consequently, Elizabeth is depressed and wills herselfto die. A voice asks if she
wants to live and reassures her that she will be freed. Is this the voice of the
ancestor working from a spiritual realm to instruct, persuade, and liberate the
narrative subject? When Elizabeth accepts this voice as a connection to a
spiritual realm she no longer believes that she is alone. This inner voice or
ancestral presence is, in a sense, empowering and liberating for Elizabeth.

Delaney recalls, after discovering that her sister had escaped, that “wildly

mother showed her joy at Nancy’s escape” when they were alone together (19).
Delaney states: “She [mother] would dance, clap her hands, and waving them
about her head, would indulge in one of those weird negro melodies, which so

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charm and fascinate the listener” (19). Furthermore, Delaney interrupts the flow
of her nanative to address the spirit of her mother directly: “Dear, dear mother!
how solemnly I invoke your spirit as I review these scenes of my girlhood, so long
agonel” (50). She reinforces her spiritual and possibly ancestral or familial
influence when, on the final page of her narrative, she remembers, “...I had been
taught that there was hope beyond the grave...” (57). “But every human
thought, once expressed, becomes reality. For the word holds the course of
things in train and changes and transforms them. And since the word has this
power, every word is an effective word, every word is binding. There is no
‘harmless’, noncommittal word. Every word has consequences” (Jahn 133).
Sass has transforrnative power.

Elizabeth’s evangelical gift is awed, revered and supported initially by
mature women in the communities she visits. Certain male communities
frequently threatened and bullied her congregations. Elizabeth recalls “I felt that I
was despised on account of this gracious calling,“ and when she looked to
ministers for instruction or conversation “...some would cry out, ”You are an
enthusiast” and others said, “the Discipline did not allow of any such division of
the work; until I began to think I surely must be wrong” (13). Religious oratory
was acceptable from the mouths of preaching men. Beleaguered by continuous
condemnations she states “I was so embarrassed and encompassed, I wondered
within myself whether all that were called to be mouth piece for the Lord, suffered

such deep wadings as I experienced” (17). Nevertheless Elizabeth met her
antagonists, found supporters and against great odds her acts helped others,

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particularly orphans in Michigan. In her conclusion, she inspires her reader as
She looks back on her evangelical works. She states “When I went forth, it was
without purse or script—and l have come through great tribulation and
temptation—not by any might of my own, for I be! that I am but as dust and
ashes before my almighty Helper,” (19). When Elizabeth went forth, seemingly, it

waswith tlreword.

‘ R !

Collectively “by the secret language of the pen,” the women debunk a
myth established by colonialists—that Black slaves had no voice, no power and
no culture. Metaphorically, the narrative women can be viewed as profane
manifestations of the female trickster figure. As they mediate their nanative
“secrets” one becomes aware of the disruptions and connections between
Central and West African, West Indies and African American cultures. Through
their sassy narrative actions the women critique the institution of slavery,
characterize the terrorism of their bondage, and articulate freedom.

Sass is complex. On the surface it appears to be direct speech or
behavior—tire actor appears to respond to an event in which she was recently
involved—the receiver or his or her agent is read’. The receiver generally finds
this behavior confrontational. Sass is stinging and not easily forgotten. If the
receiver failed to fully realize the sociopolitical issue(s) involved in sass during
the act, in retrospect it may become apparent later or more importantly the
witness understands the significance of sass. The beauty of sass is that it lingers
with the receiver or those who witness and can testify to its message. Through

the use of verbal skill, for example, the narrative women demonstrate their

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language acumen, knowledge of sociopolitical activities, and their cultural value
and beliefs. Sass appears incidental and spontaneous but it comes from women
who have long suffered and pondered the inequity of their existence. The
narrative women, like other slaves, centered on a collective desire for an end to a
system that enslaved them. Sass presented an opportunity to chip away at the
wall of slavery. Although the women were sassing their immediate oppressors
their intended audience was much wider. As an aesthetic it expressed the
women’s value, their needs and desires as well as the needs and desires of their
community. Sass then is an aspect of signifyin-“the verbal art of ritualized insult,
in which the speaker puts down, needles, talks about (signifies on) someone, to
make a point or sometimes just for fun. It exploits the unexpected, using quick
verbal surprises and humor, and it is generally characterized by nonmalicious
and principled criticism” (Smithennan Back Talk, 206). Sass, as a witty act of
criticism, is generally attributed to women.

In the following example of sass, Jackson takes on the role of heroine and
braggart Jackson is a “bad (wo)man” which means she is a heroine. She
defied her oppressor, triumphed then recorded it and mocked him. Men were
usually celebrated in this category “the exaggerated hero, black folk created
secular, human figures who could contravene the established mores and
standards of the society; figures who could pursue an independent course and

look within themselves for the necessary strength” (Levine 407). She writes:
When I made my escape from slavery l was in a query how I was to

raise funds to bear my expenses. I finally came to the conclusion

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that as the laborer was worthy of his hire, I thought my wages
should come from my master’s pocket. Accordingly I took twenty-
five dollars. After I was safe and had Ieamed to write. I sent him a
nice letter, thanking him for the kindness his pocket bestowed to
me in time of need. I have never received any answer to it.
When I complete my education, if my life is spared, I shall
endeavor to publish further details of our history in another volume
from my own pen (38).
In her sassy way and after her escape, Mattie Jackson testifies to injustice,
claims a token compensation, identifies her former self a worker and not a slave,
reprimands her former employer, denounces the institution of slavery by
interjecting and affirming her ability to make decisions and articulate them in
writing and finally recognizes the need to write the history of African American
women. In short, she unequivocally boasts her humanity and self-respect while
challenging her former employer or his agents to prove otherwise.
She is encouraging women like herself. I doubt that Jackson expected a
response from her former employer. Moreover, I doubt that her former employer
eXpected such blatant disrespect directed toward him from an old employee
within the pages of a book with the promise that more is to come.

Returning to Jackson’s” opening epigraph, consider her use of indirection,
ambiguity and double entendre. Her recommendation is made to oppressed
PeOples directly by one who suffered the bnrtalities of slavery and contempt of
Mants. Although she refers to secrets, plural, there is one secret that the

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nineteenth century women’s sass Illuminates. The power of the word
engendered, represented and generated levels of freedom for the narrative
women. One secret probably is connected to frwdom—how to claim, keep or
get it. Freedom is a state of mind. Perhaps part of the secret is that the
enslaved must spiritually own her/his own freedom. One way to experience
freedom is to profess it not with the pen literally but using what the pen
metaphorically represents— owning one’s own words. The secret therefore is
not one kept from the oppressor but the conundrum is a spiritual reality that one
keeps from ones self—freedom begins within. Jackson, like the other women in
this paper, asserts freedom by recognizing, claiming and owning-up to the power
of sass as a liberating vernacular performance.

I would like to suggest that the word secrets in opening epigraph be
removed and voices inserted: “Manage you own voices and divulge them by the
silent languages of your pen.” The narrative women were aware of the books
and the power of reading. They were also aware of amanuensis, publishers and
what type of story the public was fed. Like amanuensis, publishers and ministers
the narrative women also had agendas but moreso they maintain a cultural
tradition of sass. Most of their voices became well kept secrets for over fifty
years as their narratives were out of print. Aware that they had experiences that
needed to be heard and remembered the women conveyed their stories.
Perhaps they hoped or expect that there would be readers to understand their

textual secrets and publication silences. Nevertheless, there is value and

tradition in their words. The next chapter will focus more specifically on a literary

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progeny of the narrative women, Pauline Hopkins, and her fictional portrayal of

women and their voices.

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Notes

 

1 Further historical awareness concerning the United States cultural stereotypes of Black
women can be found in: Patricia Morton, Disfiqured Imeges (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991)
and Deborah Gray White Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York:
Norton, 1985).

2 “Sassy” Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., the sassy tree is identified as
Erythrophlceum guineense (Cynometra Mannii).

3 For a discussion of the basic principles of African philosophy in the cultures of Baluba,
Ruandese, Dogon, Haitians and the Bambara peoples “who live far apart from one another. And
for all the differences in detail these systems agree basically with one another” see: Janheinz
Jahn, MuntuzAfrican Culture and the Western World (New York: Grove Press, 1961) 99.

4 “Loud Talk,“ Geneva Smitherrnan, Black Talk: Words end Phrases from the Hood to

the Amen Corner (Boston: Houghton 1994) “To talk in such a way as to confront or embarrass

 

someone publicly” 156.

5 Furthermore, is Drumgoold signifyin on the title of the most famous women's escaped
Slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl. (1861; New York: Oxford UP,
1988) with her narrative title? Kate Drumgoold, A Slave Girl's Storfleingen Autobiogrephy of
Kate Drumgoold Six Women’s Sleve Narratives (1898; New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 3—62.
Through indirection, Drumgoold’s title promises to go beyond “incidents” to convey the entire
story of a life of a slave girl.
6 Brer Rox resented Brer Rabbit’s signifyin ways. Brer Fox trapped Brer Rabbit with a
Tar—Baby. Brer Fox intended to barbecue Brer Rabbit. However, Brer Rabbit was agreeable to
any torture except being thrown in the brier patch. Brer Fox was consumed with conquering or

d9feating Brer Rabbit so he threw Brer Rabbit into the brier patch—where Brer Rabbit had been

106

 

born and bred. Read a detailed version of the tale in: “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr.
Fox,” Eneyclogdia of Bleck Folkloreend Humor, ed. Henry D. Spalding (New York: Jonathan

Davis Pubfishers, Inc., 1990) 11-12.

7 “Read,” Smitherrnan, Black Talk 192.

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Chapter 3
PAULINE HOPKINS” SPEAKERLY HEROINES

Pauline Hopkins ...also hoped that fiction would become a tool in the struggle to
change the social, political, and economic conditions of black people. The novels
of black women, like the slave and free narratives that preceded them, did not
just reflect or ‘mirror’ a society; they attempted to change it. \fiewing novels as
weapons for social change, literary and cultural criticism needs to consider how
these novels actively structure and shape Afro-American culture and political

struggles.
Hazel V- CarbY. mm
Pauline Hopkins” serialized novel, mm, is a splendid

colbction of vocal women characters from several econorrric backgrounds. I will
look at the archetypal and unconventional aspects of the women characters and
the sociopolitical implications of their behavior. By today’s popular standards,
Hopkins heroine Venus W is unlikely. Hopkins endows Venus
with the ability to speak two languages fluently—Plantation Creole (or Black
English) and standard English. Her linguistic skills allow her to solve a murder
mystery, recover her missing grandmother and an heiress. The protagonist, as
suggested by the title is Hagar. Rather than a novel of passing, this is a novel of
revelations, unmasking and untragic mulattoes. Hagar experiences at least
three gradations of consciousness—believing she is an Anglo woman of
privilege, as an Black woman suddenly enslaved with her infant and as a Black
woman masquerading as an Anglo woman with secrets—manifested as

differences in her voice and behavior.

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The first speaking women in M11191: are enslaved women.
Waiting in the slave pen they cry out to God for understanding. “’0, my God!”
cried one woman, ‘send dy angel down once mo’ ter tell me dat you’s gwine ter
keep yer word, massa Lord’” (9). In prayer, this woman audibly reminds God,
and others who care to listen, that she believes He (God) is breaking His
covenant and that it is about time to keep or reinforce a promise made. Likewise
another woman prays aloud, “’O Lord, we’s been a-watchin’ an’ a-prayin’, but de
‘liverer done fergit usl’ cried another, as she rocked her body violently back and
forth” (10). In addition to prayer this woman seems also to be answering the
previous woman’s inquiry. It appears the only being able to respond to fire
women’s entreaties are other women in similar straits. Though contained in a
slave pen, the women are compelled to articulate their emotions openly.

The voices, concerns and relationships of Hopkins’ fictional women along
with the IIde traditional response from a critical audience inspired me to title
this chapter “Speakerly Heroines.” Gates derived the term “speakerly text” from
“...Roland Bartlres’s opposition between the ‘readerly’ and the ‘writerly’ texts...as
well as from the trope oftlre Talking Book, [it] also is a phrase used by both
[Zora] Hurston and Ishmael Reed to define their own narrative strategies” (Ine
Signmnngmnkey 198). It is the recognition of the speakerly or oral quality and
ability in characters such as Venus and Henny, convey their intentions and
demonstrate, through speech, the sociopolitical obstacles they must confront,

simultaneously. A review of their dialogues indicate their worthiness as heroines

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and the value of their speech to the story and the condition of women, sexual
exploitation, economic class and racism.

The biblical story of the Egyptian Hagar and the Hebrew Sarah
“encompasses more than ethnic prejudice. Theirs Is a story of ethnic prejudice
exacerbated by economic and sexual exploitation. Theirs is a story of conflict,
women betraying women, mothers conspiring against mothers. Theirs is a story
of social rivalry” (Weems 2)‘. Like the title, naming becomes another significant
aspect In W. Instead of a son, In this fictional world, a world that
Hopkins creates, Hagar has a daughter, the patriarch is villainous, his decisions
are questiomd and the daughters stories, like their voices, are varied.

Mrs. Sergeant is a woman with limited identity and a voice to match. She
has the surname of an officer and serves as Hegel’s mother. Hagar is the only
child of the Sergeants. The narrator states after the death of Mr. Sergeant,
“Hagar...then became her mother’s sole joy and Inspiration. Determined to
cultivate her daughter‘s rare Intellectual gifts, she had sent her North to school
when every throb of her heart demanded her presence at home” (32). Mrs.
Sergeant lacks a given name and thus an independent identity. A reader
believes that Mrs. Sergeant Is wife of Mr. Sergeant, mother of Hagar and that she
is a white woman of economic means, via her husband’s business affairs. A
reader later learns that Mrs. Sergeant Is Hagar’s surrogate mother and that her
birth mother was an unknown enslaved Black women. The reader does not
know if Mrs. Sergeant knew Hagar to be Negro. Nonetheless, Mrs. Sergeant

forgoes her desire to have her daughter by her side and sends Hagar away, at

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age fourteen, to be forrnelly educated, thus enhancing her almady “rare
intellectual gifts” (32). From Mrs. Sergeant’s point of view, education will
somehow further enrich the already intelligent, beautiful and sole heir to the
Sergeant fortune, Hagar. Mrs. Sergeant upholds the ideals of members of the
cult of true womanhood.
Hagar did not realize she trespassed the effluent socioeconomic culture of
the antebellum South. Her passport was her family, face and appearance. Mrs.
Sergeant’s finishing gift of education helped to complete the package. Mrs.
Sergeants social and economic place was solidified because of her husband.
However, if Mrs. Sergeant believed that beauty and an affluent husband were
enough to secure Hagar a comfortable place among her peers there was no
need to send her away to school. How many antebellum heterosexual bachelors
longed for a cereme lady to wed. The narrator reveals “Sometimes Hagar would
trespass” (33). Hagar enjoyed a physical and mental trespass.
She longed to mix and mingle with the gay world; she had a feeling
that her own talents, If developed, would end in something far
different from the calm routine, the housekeeping and churchgoing
which stretched before her. Sometimes softer thoughts possessed
her, and she speculated about love and lovers. This peaceful life
was too tranquil and uneventful (33-34).

Hegel’s voice was limited to her thoughts. In her thoughts she questioned the

monotony of the conventions of true womanhood.

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Ellis Enson, the forty-year old Ideal (plantation gentleman) bachelor who
“...had been so persistently pursued by all the women of the vicinity,” wants only
a women “...capable of loving a man for himself alone without a thought of
worldly advanbge” (35). Though “he had a poor opinion of himself” he can not
“bear disgrace or downfall that might touch his ancient [sur-] name” (35). When
he gazes on Hagar he identifies a beauty able to “...witch a man’s heart from
him” (35). In Hagar, Ellis finds a woman with a “...mind that could think. She
was not shy and self-conscious as young girls so often are; she seemed quite at
ease, as one who has no thought of self” (35). Without intention she “witched”
Ellis” heart and he made the following vow to eighben year-old, Hagan “’Heaven
helping me, you shall be so loved and shielded that sorrow shall never touch you.
You shall never repent trusting your young life to me’” (38). Educated Hagar
speaks little and she probably trusted in Ellis”s every word. The Sergeant women
agreed to his proposal; but, on the day before the wedding Mrs. Sergeant is
found dead. Sorrow touched Hagar. “At the end of a month Ellis put the case
plainly before her, and she yielded to his persuasions to have the marriage
solernnized at once, so that he might assume his place as her rightful protector”
(39). Up to this point, one does not really hear the voice of Hagar or Mrs.
Sergeant. They are women who handle proposals and need protecting and
persuading. Despite Ellis’ promise, he was helpless to stop death and thus
sorrow touched Hagar.

Decisions are freely made and voice is often used by “Aunt Henny, a coal-
black Negress of kindly face” who exercises her ability to speak throughout the

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novel (33). If armed only with the moniker Aunt Henny a trained reader would
surmise she Is an elderly black woman, and if not a slave, probably a former
slave. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “Aunt” was not really a name
but a designation for black women much like “Cgrlljg.” Henny‘s daughter,
Marthy, is maid to Hagar Enson. Like her mother, Marthy also speaks
throughout the novel. Marthy tells her mother that she believes Hagar, since the
birth of her baby, needed a protective charm. Henny makes the decision to see
the conjure man and have a fetish prepared after Ellis proposed to Hagar.
Though Henny knows both Enson and Hagar, It appears she has little faith that
Enson has the ability to protect his bride. Both Henny and Marthy use their
voices and make decisions for the unsuspecting mistress. Voice and act are
connected. Henny maintains that she “’was bom wif a veil. l knows a heap 0’
things by seein’ ‘em fo’ dey happens. I don” tell all I sees, but I keeps up a
smddyin’ ‘bout It’” (sic 43). Via Henny”s third eye, apparently, the merger of Ellis
and Hagar signaled trouble for Hagar. The conjure man, Unc’ Demus, told
Henny “”Long as yer mistis keep dis ‘bout her, trouble’ll neber stay so long day
joy won’t conquer him In de end’” (41). Subsequently, Henny puts the talisman
“in Missee Hagar drew ‘long wid her tickler fixins an” I wants yer, Marthy, to take
keer ob it,’ she concluded with a grave shake of her turbenned head” (41). When
Isaac Johnson (slave of Ellis” brother, St. Clair) appears Henny is confident that
trouble enters with him, just as It would with his master. Positive that Isaac
portends trouble Henny warns Ellis. Hagar Is concerned that Ellis looks grave.

He states “”My dear, the slaves all look upon him as a bird of evil omen; for

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myself, I look upon it all as mere ignorant superstition, but still I have a feeling of
uneasiness” (46). Ellis must disregard the warning because it is based on
something intuitive, something associated with slaves and their culture.
Nevertheless like Mrs. Sergeant, both Henny and Marthy assume a need to take
care of Miss Hagar beyond what her rich husband offers. Henny is confident in
her decisions and voice and credits herself with insight and intelligence. The
suneptitious probcb'on of Henny and Marthy for Hagar suggests “there Is nothing
inherently Ignoble about being a maid, nor anything inherently honorable about
being an employer of a maid” just that some women need protection (Weems 9).
The unnamed slave women previously mentioned prayed for such safekeeping
from their heavenly guardian. Hagar, it seems, does not have to ask, seek or
pray for protection, all want to insulate her. The difference among the women Is
their self-knowbdge, class designation and awareness of race in American
culture.

More apparent however, Hopkins sets up a parallel relationship to that of
Hagar and Ellis with Marthy and Isaac. When Isaac returns to the estate Marthy
is less than coy ”regarding the athletic young Negro with undisguised admiration”
(42). Though Henny tells Isaac that he, like his master, Is trouble, “Isaac
improved the time between the going and coming of Aunt Henny by making
fierce love to Marthy, who was willing to meet him more than half way” (44). The
narrator observes tlret “Marthy was a born coquette, and Isaac was very gallant
to her” (47). Hagar is “a perfect picture of sweet womanhood” coy end
unassuming during her brief wooing while Marthy shows “her tiny white teeth

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...tossles] her head” and grins as she actively participates in her courtship and
talks with Isaac (46, 47). Unlike Mrs. Sergeant, Henny does not approve of
Isaac. Isaac fails to make a vow to Marthy and they remain coupled longer than
Hagar and Ellis. Nevertheless, all of Hagar's “rare intelbctual gifts” were
needed to prepare her for a racist reality that created a maternal fact with the
power to transform her simultaneously from white to black, free to slave, wife to
concubine, mother of a baby to a breeder of stock and from rich to poor. Hagar
ponders:
Could it be true, or was It but a hideous nightmare from which she
would soon awake? Her mother a slave! She wondered that the
very thought did not strike her dead. With shrinking horror she
contemplated the black abyss into which the day’s events had
hurled her, leaving her there to grove! and suffer the tortures of the
damned. Her name gone, her pride of birth shattered on one blowl
Was she, indeed, a descendant of naked black savages of the
horrible African jungles? Could it be that the blood of generations
of these unfortunate ones flowed through her veins? Her
education, beauty, refinement, what did they profit her now
if—horrible thought—Ellis, her husband, repudiated her? Her heart
almost ceased beating with the thought, and she crouched still
lower in the dust of utter humiliation (57).
A fact of Heger’s heritage is revealed shortly after the birth of her daughter. Her

biological mother was an enslaved Black women.

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The slave catcher (Walker) claims Hagar and Infant as his property at her
husband’s estate. She Is once again faced with Ellis’ violation of his premarital
vow; however, this time he had control over the degree of Hager”s suffering.
Elllis manages to utter the following words, after paying for his wife and daughter,
“’I would willingly give the money twice over, even my whole fortune, if it did not
prove my wife to be of Negro blood,’ replbd Ellis, with such despair in his tones
that even these men, inured to such scenes from infancy, were touched with
awe” (56). The rejected Hagar, as a Negro woman and mother, assumes a new
responsibility for herself and her infant daughter.

After authorities decide Ellis committed suicide and that Hagar is an
impoverished, enslaved Black mother, she finds a voice, one that accuses,
curses, and questions without permission. She tells St. Clair (her brother-In-
law)“’l have come without your bidding, sir, for I have something to say to you,”
(69). Hagar speaks when and where she deems It appropriate. As she recalls
the suicide for St. Clair and Walker, the narrator observes that “A chill crept over
her listeners. No one had ever seen the gentle Hagar Sergeant In her present
character” (70). She Identifies St. Clair as his brother’s murderer", this causes
him to cringe. “’This is too much for any man to stand from a nigger wench.
You have sealed your own fete. Off you go, my fine madam, to the Washington
market in short meter. I would have kept you near me, and made your life as
easy as It has been In the past, but this settles It’” (70-71). Voicelessness could
have ensured a comfortable existence for Hagar—perhaps. St. Clair has
Promised, is willing and has the means to sell Hagar and her daughter and for

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some reason she continues to sass/resist him and behave in a more empowered
manner than before when she thought herself white. Eyeing St. Clair from head
to foot she remarks “’Selfish, devilish, cruel,’ she said slowly; ‘think not that your
taunts or cruelties can harm me; I care not for them. No heart in your bosom; no
blood in your veins! You are his slayer, and his blood Is crying from the ground
against you this very hour’” (71). The narrator states her last assertion is more
than he could bear. Before leaving the room she curses St. Clair or makes a
prediction, depending on one’s point of view:

“It’s the tnithl you’re his murderer, and in spite of the wealth
and position you have played for and won, you have seen the last
on this earth of peace or happiness.” Then striking her breast, she
added:

“As I have parted with the same friends! Pleasant dreams to
you, St. Clair Enson, master of Enson Halll” (71).

The acknowledgement of Hagar Sergeant as an enslaved black women also
seem to loosen Hagar’s tongue. Her vituperetions against St. Clair demonstrate
an articulate and passionate voice, compliments to her mother. Additionally her
voice also suggests the moral conscience of the country. She escapes with her
baby, and when cornered on a bridge then leaps. Hagar, then, responds as one
would expect some slave mothers. The story moves from the antebellum period
to the 1880s, and Hopkins” women characters have much more to say and do.
During the antebellum period, Mrs. Sergeants Identity was erased. All

she had was a name. Unfortunately, she lacked a first name; and when she wed

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she sacrificed her family surname as well. Therefore, Mrs. Sargeant, although a
woman of means, was bereft of self-identity end of her family history because of
tradition. On the other hand, Henny forgoes any acknowledgement of a
surname, previous family history or an identity of the father of Marthy. Marthy
also lacks a surname. However their given names seem to help in the
development of their personalities—their identities are not smothered and
obscumd by a surname. Hagar manages to obtain two “respected” surnames
(Sergeant and Enson) but they could not save her from the enslaved unnamed
Black women who gave birth to her.

Mrs. Sergeant and Hagar are portrayed as women who would not dimctly
exploit their slaves. Whether Mrs. Sergeant knew of Hager’s birth mother or not
she used the little power endowed her by her husband and enhanwd Heger’s
intelbctual capacity. Additionally, Hagar’s identity, like that of Marthy and Henny,
is extended because she can be recognized by a first name. Beyond the law,
Hagar’s reenslevement was petemalistically reinforwd through her humiliation,
dehumanization, and an attack on her identity. The crashing blow, her husband,
the dashing Ellis, broke his premarital vow and participated in her humiliation.

Though Hagar has been unmasked as a slave, the women who cleaned
her masses and waited on her, seemingly, never varied in their concern for her.
Did Henny know Hagar's mother was enslaved, and if so, how did she
know—from being with the family or her third eye? What made Marthy care
about Heger‘s well being? Henny was with the Sergeant family for years,

according to the text, yet Henny did not have the same concern for Mrs.

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Sergeant as she did for Hagar. And like the biblical story of Hagar, Hopkins’
novel W is also about class difference. Hagar seems passive
and utters few remarks until she is reveabd as a black women.

She is immediately acceptable because of her initial appearance as a
young, beautiful, smart, rich and energetic white woman who, while cleaning the
colonial china, is innocently waiting for a rich bachelor to pluck her from the
dining room so they can unite resources as husband and wife and merge their
capitalist chords in the song of love and spring. When the perfect plantation
platform is in place and Hagar is wed to the ideal husband, one needs to
remember the title of Hopkins’ tale. This Hagar, unlike Abraham and Sarah’s
Hagar, gives birth to a daughter—Hopkins takes on a traditional plot. \M'rat
appears too perfect and pristine even to the characters, which adds to the
significance of this plot, is that seemingly neither Hagar, Ellis nor Marthy know
that Hagar is a Black women. Further, if Hagar knew of her biological mother this
would be a novel of passing rather than a novel that confronts the conventions
and ideologies of race. The voices of the Sergeant women, pre-Negro revelation
period, varied from those of Henny and Marthy.

Nonetheless, Hagar as a muletta figure, along with Estelle, Jewel and
Amelia/Aurelia, (other characters in the novel), allow a reader to explore the
issues associated with the designation “tragic mulatta.’ Carby finds:

In relation to the plot, the muletta figure allowed for movement
between two worlds, white and black, and acted as a literary

displacement of the actual increasing separation of the races. The

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mulatta figure was a recognition of the difference between and

separateness of the two races at the same time as it was a product

of a sexual relationship between white and black (90).
Barbara Christian points out that the image of the mulatta “has been with us
since the beginnings of the American novel. Cora Munro, one of the minor
characters in Cooper’s The Lg: of the Mohjgns (1826), is an octoroon, and she
is a foreshadowing of the many octoroons who appear in the literature of the
nineteenth century, for she meets with a tragic end" (16). Christian goes on to
state that as a result of an illicit relationship the mulatta “suffers from a
melancholy of the blood that inevitably leads to tragedy. In contrast to the
southern lady, whose beauty, refinement, and charm bring her admiration, love,
and happiness, the fruit of miscegenation is Tragedy, regardless of what other
positive characteristics the mulatta might possess” (16). it would appear, initially,
that the antebellum Hagar and her infant daughter suffered the typical plight of
the tragic mulatta. However, Hopkins quickly revises that plot line and character
tragedy with the Post-Reconstruction entry of Aurelia Madison.

Aurelia Madison is an articulate women character who transcends the
image of the tragic mulatta and propriety. The narrator describes Aurelia as “a
woman—young in years, but with a mature air of a woman of the world...The girl
had a woman’s voluptuous beauty with great dusky eyes and wonderful red-gold
hair” (90). Aurelia’s foil, the perfect Jewel, is described as follows:
Jewel Bowen’s beauty was of the Saxon type, dazzling fair, with

creamy roseate skin. Her hair was fair, with streaks of copper in it;

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her eyes, gray with thick short lashes, at times iridescent. Her nose
superbly Grecian. Her lips beautifully firm, but rather serious than
smiling.
Jewell was not unconscious of her attractions. She had been
loved, flattered, worshipped for twenty years. She was proud with
the pride of conscious worth that demanded homage as a tribute to
her beauty—to herself (82).
Like Hagar, Jewel is raised by a surrogate mother, Estelle Marks Bowen. Prior to
marrying Zenas, Estelle, a waitress in a Bohemian resort in San Francisco, is
descriMd as “a young women of great beauty“ and “an honorable women who
would not betray his confidence” (81). The nouveau riche senator, Zenas
Bowen, also has working-class roots and his appearance is characterized as
‘peculiar. Middle height, lank and graceless. He had the hair and skin of an
Indien,... There was no denying his awkwardness; no amount of polish could
make him othemise. His relation to his family was mad tender, his wife and
daughter literally worshipping the noble soul that dwelt within its ungainly casket”
(80-81). The dark Zenas is the father of the most fair Jewel; and Jewel’s mother,
the reader assumes, must have been quite flexen. Millionaire Zenas, though
dusky hued, is elected state senator from Celifomia. Zenas is understood as one
other than Anglo Saxon not only via appearance but in his spach:

Every characteristic of his was of the self-made pattern. In familiar

conversation with intimate friends, it was his habit to fell into the

use of ungremmatical phrases, and, in this, one might easily trace

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the rugged windings of a life of hardship among the great

unwashed before success had crowned his labors and steered his

bark into its present smooth harbor (80).
Zenas achieves his elected position with the help of his wife, who “recognized
her husband’s sterling worth in business and morals, and insisted upon his
entering the arena of politics. Thanks to her cleverness, he made no mistakes
and many hits which no one thought of tracing to his wife’s rare talents” (81-82).
Estelle also reminded him to speak standard English when he lapsed into his
‘ungrammetical phrases.” Mrs. Bowen finds that speaking the “’vemacular of the
gold mines here in Washington. You’ll be eternally disgraced" (88). Language
or rather vernacular can be used as a marker which enables some to decide
what economic class in which to place a speaker. Language will again become
an issue when the characteristics of feminine perfection are reviewed in Venus.
Mrs. Estelle Marks Bowen is actually Hagar Sergeant Enson. As a former white,
then enslaved black and currently undeclared but apparently white woman
(again) the new Mrs. Bowen understood the importance of language, voice,
gender and color.

During the late nineteenth century “in order to gain a public voice as
orators or published writers, black women had to confront the domestic
ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood which excluded them from the
definition ‘woman”' (Carby 6). ln Heger’s Qagghter, Hopkins confronts the
construct of womanhood with female characters who create and claim

themselves as subjects and rulers of their own bodies in the face of ideologies

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and conventions of nineteenth century womanhood. Jewel Bowen’s whiteness is
celebrated and reason for heterosexual reward and reverence. Aurelia
acknowledges Jewel’s beauty when speaking with Sumner, adding “’and she is
good, not like me" (103). Sumner, Jewel’s fiancee, exclaims “’She is an angel,
my white angel of purity,’ he replied with a look of reverence on his face” (103).
At this point the narrator interrupts for a comparison and contrast of the beautiful
women:
Aurelia was a gorgeous tropical flower", Jewel, a fair fragrant lily.
Men have such an unfortunate weakness for tropical blooms, they
cannot pass them by carelessly, even though a lily lies above their
hearts. Cuthbert [Sumner] could not ignore this splendid tropical
flower; it caused his blood to flow faster, it gave new zest to
living—for an hour. Jewel was his saint, his good angel; and he
loved her truly with all the high love a man of the world can ever
know. He trusted her for her womanly goodness and truth (103).
Aurelia is constructed to be the antithesis of Jewel. Metaphorically, Jewel is a
“fair fragrant lily” named and classified while Aurelia is likened to a “gorgeous
tropical flower' no genus but cultivated in a warm climate thus exhibiting dark or
colorful features. Although men have weaknesses for “exotic” beauties who
could witch a man’s heart for a time, it is the genealogy and cultivation of white
womanhood that provides a high love, truth and goodness. The narrator's
observation suggests that Sumner salutes and reveres Jewel while his baser

desires are stimulated by Aurelia. Finally, if Jewel represents goodness and

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purity then Aurelia represents wickedness and depravity. Such binaries were
used during the turn of the century in literature as instruction for ladies
concerning the proper behavior and expected punishments for those who failed
to conform. Hopkins clearly took exception to such conventions.

Hopkins’ character Aurelia is particularly exciting because she is
constructed like a trickster figure; if she were male, she could be an epic hero.
Lawrence Levine, for example, finds that black epic heroes “could stand within
the very center ofwhite society, and they could stand there as black men
operating Victoriously on their own terms" (438). Aurelia knows that her mother
was an enslaved black woman. She does not deny her blackness or pass for
white nor does she herald the issue. When Benson, a long time friend of the
family, attempts to recruit Aurelia for his scheme to steal millions she tells him “’I
have a hankering for respectability that amounts to a passion” (97). After
Benson asks if she ever thought of marrying for money she responds:

“’But you know too well my reasons for hesitating in such a course.’
Benson moved uneasily in his seat, and for a moment his
eyes dropped under the steady gaze that the girl bent upon
him—eyes large, dreamy, melting, dazzling the sense, but at this
moment baleful” (97).
Aurelia’s gaze and ambiguous wording cause a nefarious villain like Benson to
cringe. She goes on to reveal “’It is the wrong lead for a woman like me,—an
edventuress, to forget her position for one instant and allow her heart to guide

her head” (97-98). Aurelia characterizes herself as one who lives by her wits.

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She is previously described as “aiding her father in his games of chance, luring
the gilded youth to lose their money without murrnuring. Hers had been a
precarious life and a dangerous one“ (92). And though she has a hankering for
respectability Aurelia views honesty “as a luxury for the wealthy to enjoy“ (92).
Aurelia knows the truth about her mother and Benson does too. As a speaker
she is assertive in her interaction with Benson whose gaze lowers under her
response. Benson’s mistress, Elise Bradford, reveals to Sumner that Benson
rejected her for Aurelia. “’That is not the worst thing about her,’ replied the
women with a bitter smile. Will you believe me when I tell you that she is a
quedroon? ...the child of Major Madison’s slave, born about the time the war
broke out. This is why the two men find in her a willing tool" (158-159). The
worst aspect of Aurelia, according to Bradford, is that she is a product of
miscegenation. Benson, apparently finds that Aurelia’s acceptance of her
maternal roots and unhesitating ability to offer confident, quick, witty replies
makes him somewhat insecure including her in his sinister machinations.

Sumner, on the other hand, responds like a rejected Victorian women
when he hears of Aurelia’s maternity. “’My Godl’ exclaimed Sumner as he wiped
the perspiration from his face, “a negressl this is too horrible.’ Repeated shocks
had unnerved him, and he felt weak and bewildered” (159). Consequently,
Sumner sees Aurelia as a hazard to marriageable white men “’But a white man
may be betrayed into marrying her. I certainly came near to it myself” (160).
Three years prior to his engagement to Jewel, Sumner pledged himself to
Aurelia. The narrator recalls:

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They [Aurelia and Sumner] had loved and been betrothed; had
quarreled fiercely over a flirtation on her part and had separated in
bitterness and pain; and yet the man was relieved way down in a
corner of his heart for he had felt dimly, after the first rapture was
over, that he was making a mistake, that she was not the woman to
command the respect of his friends nor to bring him complete
happiness (92).
Sumner, although a man moved by his passions, submitted to the discernment of
the public, like Ellis. Sumner, it appears, is also a character easily manipulated,
and as Aurelia is a clever woman of the world, she undoubtedly understood the
whims and desires of Sumner and intentionally engaged in a “flirtation“ as she
prepared to tell him the truth. At the time Aurelia believed “Cuthbert Sumner's
wife could afford to be honest“ (92-93). She certainly could not tell others the
truth without revealing the truth to him. However, as the narrator outlines,
Sumner, like Ellis, did not embody the same love that he professed when
becoming engaged to Aurelia. While facing first degree murder charges Sumner,
a prisoner, allows Jewel to sully her good name when she secretly weds him.
Aurelia offers to save him from prosecution “’All I ask in return is that you take me
to your heart again as your affianced wife, and I shall be content” (236). Proud
Sumner exclaims “’If my acquittal depends upon the plan you have mentioned,
Miss Madison, I shall never be free" (236). Sumner, ostensibly, is embarrassed

by his passionate emotions for Aurelia.

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The jail cell incident between Aurelia and Sumner is quite telling. When
Sumner threatens to make Aurelia a social outcast if she remains in Washington,
DC, “she laughed aloud ferociously and then began a tirade of abuse that would
have honored the slums“ (238). The historic metalanguage of race grouped all
blacks no matter their beauty, income, education, morals or manners, “into a
normative well of inferiority and subserviency' (E. Higginbotham 8).
Higginbotham points out that “Until the Civil Rights are of the 1960s, race
effectively served as a metaphor for class“ (8). The exposure of Aurelie’s racial
configuration ideally would cause the rejection of prior suitors, party invitations
and her being considered a lady in Washington DC. Sumner decides to end all
future relations between them adding “’if you were as pure as snow, and I loved
you as my other self, I would never wed with one of colored blood, an octaroonl”
(sic 238). The intrepid and earnest Aurelia states “’I will not fiy—l will breve you
to the lastl If the world is to condemn me as the descendant of a race that I
abhor, it shall never condemn me as a coward l" (238). Aurelia is sassy and
refuses to deny her heritage and be made voiceless. The implied author
immediately interrupts, offering something akin to a chorus, to contextualize this
situation and its impact on Aurelia:

Terrible though her sins might be—terrible her nature, she was but
another type of the products of the accursed system of slavery—a
victim of “man’s inhumanity to man“ that has made “countless
millions mourn." There was something, too, that compelled

admiration in this resolute standing to her guns with the

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deterrninetion to face the worst that fate might have in store for her.

Something of all this Sumner felt, but beyond a certain point his

New England philanthropy could not reach (238).
Aurelia unveiled is a revelation of her influences. Yet she manages to surpass all
constraints and restrictions that held her down. Further, the authorial voice
questions if Aurelia committed terrible sins and suggests that there is reason to
applaud her resolve and self-regard. The reader knows that although many men
want to marry Aurelia, to her detriment, she loves only one man, Sumner. By
Sumner‘s standards Aurelia’s sin consists in deceiving innocent white men of
means into believing that she was marriageable materiel. He did not seem too
concerned that she lured them into games of chance to lose their money.
Sumner, because he was once engaged to marry Aurelia (though only the reader
knows of the engagement) whose blood is tainted (he believes via her mother),
now wants to make her disappear.

Along with her other activities, Aurelia is also characterized in the novel as
smoking, talking like a men, being shrewd and intelligent. She knowingly
assumes an alias surname, following the instruction of her father, and agrees to
manipulate the man she loves for financial independence (106). Her cultural
training is authenticated by the high-brow crowd when she plays the piano, on
request: “And she was worth listening to for she was a cultumd amateur of no
mean ability, and gave genuine pleasure by her performance. ...Mrs. Bowen
thanked her warmly as she rose from the instrument, followed by the plaudits of

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the company” (109). Aurelia’s relationship with Jewel reinforces her
multidimensional attributes. The narrator states:
She had taken a great fancy to Jewel Bowen, not only because the
latter was very kind to her—kinder than anyone had ever been to
her in her lonely, reckless life, but because she really carried in her
heart a spark of what passed for love and which would have
developed but for Sumner. She could even admire Jewel’s beauty
without jealousy; she did not envy her her wealth although so
pinched herself in money matters, and yet—strange nature of
women, or of some women—for the reason she was the more
determined to triumph over her as a woman, and, if she could, stab
her. She had forced the friendship with that intention (121-122).
Aurelia is a sassy character who refuses to be limited on the basis of race,
gender, sexuality or class. However, one must question how she trespasses
such barriers during the 1880s in Washington DC. Aurelia is never at a loss for
words. Elise Bradford, (a poor to working-class white woman character), in her
summary of the lives on “Negro women of mixed blood” finds:
...they refuse to mate themselves with the ignorant of their own
race. Socially, they are not recognized by the whites; they are
often without money enough to but the barest necessities of life;
honorably, they cannot procure sufficient means to gratify their
luxurious testes; their mothers were like themselves; their fathers

they never knew; debauched whitemen are ever ready to take

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advantage of their destitution, and after living a short life of shame,

they sink into early graves. Living, they were despised by whites

and blacks alike; dead, they are mourned by none (159).
Aurelia is not a character to be quieted or forgotten. After becoming
reacquainted Sumner finds “her air was bolder” (122). She does not pass for
white; she trespasses the conventions of womanhood. Her complexion and
beauty allow her entree into her chosen society while voice, skill, assertiveness,
intelligence and desire allow her to remain there. Ironically, Aurelia thrives in a
space (of her construction) in which bourgeois notions of sexual purity and true
womanhood loom menacingly. Her lack of shame also enable her to navigate
the turbulent waters of race, sex, and class causing her to avoid blackmail.

The only white women who braved the rough rivers of sexual purity and
true womanhood, one imagines, is Mrs. Sergeant whose history and identity
remain ambiguous. Zenas Bowen’s first wife, also nameless, existed before he
became wealthy, therefore she could not be counted among the throngs of true
womanhood members. Further, her ethnicity is unknown. Patricia J. \Mlliams
states, in her book W99,

From Revolutionary times forward, white women's lives in the
United States became increasingly interiorized, their sphere of
influence relegated to the domestic, until by the end of the 18008
the so-called cult of true womanhood had produced a sacralized
vision of domesticity that for many was as much prison as “home.“

Women were privy to a domestic life that was relentlessly

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idealized—that idealization being the subject of so much of the
literature of authors like Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman—end a legal life in which they had limited rights to property,
contract, and divorce, no right to vote, and the “right“ to be beaten
by a stick of no greater thickness than the husband’s thumb (158-
159)
Hopkins, a contemporary of Chopin and Gilman, questions the sacredness of
domestic life for women. Elise Bradford is the only fully fleshed white woman
character in Hagar’s Daught_er. Bradford was orphaned young and brought up by
her aunt in Kentucky. Seeking a position as a well-paid government clerk, she
came to Washington, DC, at the age of eighteen. Bradford, jobless, friendless
and poor, secured a position as Benson’s clerk in the Treasury Building. She
sought a public existence rather than a domestic one. On her arrival, there is no
indication that she hoped to find a marriageable partner. She is trying to fulfill her
goals and desires—to earn a living wage and also provide financial support for
her aunt. Bradford’s goal is compelling when one remembers that she is a
Southern woman from a poor, woman-centered background. During the 18808,
when Bradford becomes an office clerk, women were recent entries into office
work—“in 1870, women were only about 3 percent of office workers, but by 1890,
they were 17 percent“ (Woloch 246). With Bradford, Hopkins highlights career
ambitions for women. Before dating Jewel, Sumner, “felt a passing admiration
for the good-looking stenographer” (152).

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Miss Bradford is conscious of her status in the community and of other
women. It should be noted that female office workers “were better educated than
women in industry, they considered themselves as an elite among women
employees. An office worker might earn no more than a skilled garment worker,
but the work itself was more regular, ‘dignified’ and desirable“ (Woloch 246).
After five years of employment Bradford is the unmarried mother of a son who,
lives with her aunt, has no friends and leads a solitary lifestyle. Her story
becomes a cautionary tale about working in a dignified and desirable
environment. She remembers “I had tasted poverty, I appreciated its effect on
my future welfare, and I sickened at the thought“ (158). Bradford claims: ”Official
wealth, power and opportunity were my ruin. I was led to confide in the chief
[Benson] by his high position; and he, like others in such places, deceived me
and betrayed that confidence" (158). She states “’I stood before him crushed for
all etemity—to me, who had fallen, without a drought of resistance, under the
charm of his manner and beauty, that have ruined more than one woman among
those who are above me in wealth and position" (161). The women above her
are only distinguished by economic class not as married or single but women,
like herself, who trusted in the charm and beauty of a man. She asserts “I feel
my own misery and degradation. I am selfish in my despair” (159). Though she
must suffer the disgrace of unwed pregnancy alone she remains voiceless in
Washington D. C. In addition to being voiceless, she becomes a childless

mother just to be near the man she loves.

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About a year after her arrival Benson manages to further violate Bradford
when he renders her silent with a threat:

“Elise, it is particularly necessary for my future plans that this affair

of ours be kept secret. If you bury it in your heart, and seal your

lips upon it, you shall be recompensed finally, I will never lose sight

of you and the boy, but direct that a large sum shall be paid to you

yearly. If not—people have died for a less offense than that" (161).
In her years of silence, it seems, Bradford has learned many secrets but not
enough about Benson. Benson achieves with Bradford what Sumner wanted to
accomplish with Aurelia—silence. Being voiceless and childless become an
overwhelming existence and Bradford decides to confess to Sumner, she states,
“’I feel a desire to talk on forbidden subjects, to take someone into my
confidence” (153). Haunted by, as she says, her sins she feels compelled to
speak and she finds her voice (153). As one who was silenwd for years she
now has the power to silence—at one point she shouts “’Silencel” to the
interrupting Sumner (155). Unapologetically, Bradford maintains that she
silences him for his own benefit.

Bradford responds to an urge to confess; specifically, she offers a last
confession. Bradford reveals to Sumner that he has been set-up by Benson,
who loved her until he started an affair with Aurelia, “a quadroon” (158).
Conceivably, Aurelia was used by Benson as an excuse to justify his break with
Bradford. When Aurelia and Benson meet there is nothing to indicate a sexual
relationship between them, but mounting proof that he finds her desirable and

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knows Aurelia to be a woman of color. Further, she is one of the few women he
does not threaten or unknowingly manipulate. Nevertheless, Bradford tells the
visibly shaken Sumner “’Do not blame her [Aurelia]. Fate is against her. She is
helpless" (159). Perhaps Bradford is torn in her feelings about Aurelia, but she
does believe that she is some sort of interloper whose appeal needs to be
abolished. Her final remarks to Sumner are “I shall be repaid if only you
circumvent that woman [Aurelia], and all is made right between you and Miss
Bowen“ (162). However, as Bradford demonstrates, it is the single, poor or
working-class woman who must suffer for individualism and sensuality. She
states:
“I felt that my only chance lay in matching his cunning with
diplomacy. ...I would agree to all he asked if he would allow me to
retain my position in the office with him, and would provide for the
boy and educate him. ...I have learned much by being here. I
know enough to ruin him. I planned for it and l have succeeded.
He dares not go against me now, and so he has promised
marriage, and I shall once more hold my head up among honest
women” (161).
Bradford wants to hold her head up among honest women and Aurelia wants
wealth so that she can be honest. Bradford’s plan of marriage was flawed
because she, like Aurelia, did not listen to her intended. Benson, as good as his
word, kills Bradford but not before she exercises her voice. Beauty or loveliness

offers Hagar, Aurelia or Bradford little when it comes to romance. Aurelia, it

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appears, was willing to keep her options open even when approaching Sumner.
One assumes she recognizes his duplicitous behavior. However, Bradford
unquestionably knows Benson as a cruel criminal and womanizer and she is
satisfied with forcing him to many her. Bradford is unrealistic in using her voice
just to ensnare Benson into marriage.

Nevertheless, Hopkins further challenges an ideal of feminine perfection
and power of voice with the character Venus—(Latin name for goddess of beauty
and love) (Rule 117). Hopkins intentionally names a black servant woman
character Venus with all that it denotes and as such gives another face and voice
to love and beauty. When introduced into the novel, Bowen is immediately
stimulated hearing the name of his daughter's servant. “’That the name of your
new maid, Blossom?’ the Senator's voice demanded...’Humpl Name enough to
hang her: Venus, the goddess of love and beautyl Can she earn her salt?” (89).
Hopkins uses Bowen to remind readers the meaning of the name Venus.
Furthermore, I believe that this signaling of her name and questioning of her
ability also foreshadows the depths of love and beauty that a reader will come to
understand about Venus.

Venus Camilla Johnson is a character who is usually ignored, and when
recognized by critics, is often stereotymd as a minstrel figure. Venus is the
daughter of former slaves Marthy and Isaac Johnson who are currently employed
as servants to their former masters. I suspect either Venus’ gender, economic

status, complexion or her diglossicz ability—Plantation Creole to Standard

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English—one or all are enough for some crities to deny her visibility let alone
hero status.

The insightful study by Claudia Tate, Domfitic Alggofi gf Pglm' 'gl
995$, finds Venus lacking in her heroine qualities. Tate finds that all of
Hopkins’ novelistic heroines embody “Eurocentric beauty“ (63). Physically, there
is nothing to tie Venus to Eurocentric beauty: she is born into what seems like a
succession of dusky hued slaves. She is judged by appearances and marked by
gender and skin tone before speaking. Venus is undeniably an African American
woman and no amount of dialogue, be it Plantation Creole or Standard English,
can grant her heroine status. Tate states,

...the text reveals Venus’s integrity, intelligence, and courage, but
her presence does not disrupt or even challenge the viewpoint that
she is not the material of which real heroines are made. Without a
doubt the ideology of Western beauty had conditioned
readers—black and white alike—to expect fair heroines and to
bestow sympathy on the basis of the purity of character, aligned to
the purity of their Caucesoid comeliness (63).
Tate’s conclusion is based on her study of sentimental literature at the turn of the
century. By the standards of that sentimental literature Tate decrees Venus
unworthy of “real heroine“ status but deserving of being a servant—honest,
intelligent and courageous. When examining nineteenth-century African
American women’s literature, one must confront the prevailing trope of the tragic

mulatto and the cult of true womanhood. A heroic African American female

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character from the nineteenth century with a complexion deeper than butter
would generally be thought of as an older, jolly mammy character and therefore
comic.

It is Venus’ intervention (on several occasions) in the kidnapping of
Hagar's daughter that frees Jewel Bowen (who is actually Hagar’s daughter),
exposes the actual murderer and the further involvement and corruption of
General Benson and Major Madison, and reunites Hagar with her first husband
and daughter. It is Venus who contacts “chief of the secret service” J. Henson,
revealing where she believes Bowen and his culprits to be (186). When she
enters Henson’s office, the narrator describes Venus as “a young colomd girl
who had an extremely intelligent, wide-awake expression” (223). She
understands that her father (Isaac) works for an unscrupulous thief and is
therefore part of the criminal life as well. Once she begins to give information to
Henson the nanator states, “Venus forgot her education in her earnestness, and
fell into the Negro vernacular, talking and crying at the same time” (224). After
she communicates (in the Negro vernacular) to Henson where she believes the
kidnapped Jewel has been taken, who the perpetrators are and two pages of
interaction Henson states “I understand your drift now“ (227). Chief of a
government office with numerous agents Henson asks the ever clever Venus
“are you brave enough to risk something for the sake of your mistress?“ (227).
Adding “’It comes to just this: someone must go down to this plantation in
Maryland, and hang around to find out if there is truth to our suspicions. Can
you wear boys’ clothing?" (emphasis mine 227). It is unclear if he hires or

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volunteers her, but he masculinizes her. He gives her the undercover name Billy
and partners her with an agent posing as her grandfather, “Uncle Henry, a
crippled old Negro, fond of drink“ (27). To crack the case Billy and Uncle Henry
must be able to speak Plantation Creole to blend in with the people and their
surroundings. Later, when Venus thinks of a way to get into the plantation where
Jewel and Aunt Henny are being held, Henry respectfully acknowledges “’I take
off my hat to you, young lady, I does, an’ I’m goin’ to give the chief a pointer to git
you on the staff," (240). Venus saves the women without violence or further
harm.

Kristina Brooks asserts that Negro characters who speak Plantation
Creole contribute to discernible stereotypes such as “Mammies, Bucks and
Wenches“—the title of her essay. Brooks finds Venus

...a figure who can mediate between the slave characters who
cannot survive off the plantation and the mixed—race characters
such as Jewel and Aurelia whose unhappy fates attest to persistent
racism. Both chronologically and geographically, then, Venus
serves as a bridge: between the (slave) ancestors and the (free)
descendents, and between the southern and northern cultures
where these characters are located (147).
Brooks maintains that Venus “still retains marks of a degraded past“ (147). Her
degraded past manifests itself in the scene with Henson where Venus “fell into
the Negro vernacular...“ (Hopkins 224). According to Brooks, “here black dialect
is clearly represented as a step below ‘white' English, which is consistently

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spoken by all of the mixed-raced female characters” (148). When Brooks
combines Venus’ African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and related body
movements and functions, she finds that “Hopkins embodies both the comic
tradition of the black minstrelsy and the uncommon (i.e., unmcorded) tradition of
black heroism. Though objectified in particular instances, Venus is primarily an
African American subject, whose representation remains distinct from those of
her ancestors“ (148). In an oblique manner, Brooks acknowledges Venus’ ability
to speak standard English as an aspect that sets her apart from her family.
Brooks does not take into account the “variability in the judgments given
about the English of the runaways” during the eighteenth century. The language
of some runaway slaves was described as—“very good English, pretty good
English and speaks proper English to speaks English though somewhat
Negroish, He speaks remarkably good English for a Negro, speaks rather more
proper than Negroes in general“ (Dillard 84). Dillard states that “the majority of
these advertisements do indicate that the runaways spoke ‘good English'—e
term which Europeans seemingly never apply to a pidgin and almost never to a
creole. ...the implication of the term good English would be ‘rather like the
English of a white man” (84-85). Venus” diglossia is not a reason to make her
distinct from her ancestors. Smitherrnan points out that during slavery, “it is
highly probable that the black speakers of White English, because of proximity
and necessity, commanded the Black English Creole as well“ (Igikmm
m 13). Additionally with the diglossic character Venus, Hopkins gives

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readers a deeper peek into the inner workings of gender, race, language and
their relationships to power.

The response from some crities reinforces the prejudices related to AAVE.
Venus is a self-defined, adventurous, thinking and controlled individual who
wants Henson, a Southerner, to take action. As a close reader and as a Black
women, who is acquainted with how some forms of contestation operate within
the confines of relations of power, I understand that beneath the surface of the
narrator’s description of Venus as one who “fell into the Negro vernacular, talking
and crying at the same time” that there is some ‘reading dialect’ at work (224).
Hopkins is reading dialect through Venus. Venus intentionally selects, not falls,
into Plantation Creole. However, in speaking Plantation Creole, Hopkins
reinforces to a community of African Americans, particularly women, the
relationship between speaker and listener and how a message will be interpreted
by a particular audience. The targeted receiver, Henson, prefers to deal with one
who speaks Plantation Creole rather than standard American dialect. Why?
Because as Tate established previously, Venus does not fit the norm and she
transgresses the boundary of heroine when she approaches the chief of the
Secret Service to give him the who, why, what and where of a major crime. With
Venus, Hopkins creates layers on layers of reading dialect that confronts the
public stereotype of talkin African American women as mammies or sexualized
Jezebels or Saphires. Venus is too young to be a mammy and she is not being

portraying as sexual when she tries to get Henson to take action. She cries,

14o

which is a feminine act, that bolstered the psyche of some men. To make
Henson bel more superior she then “fell into the Negro vernacular.“

Plantation Creole talkin Venus unsuccessfully tries to mask her wisdom,
ingenuity and intelligence so ultimately Henson can comfortably remark to her
that he needs someone to “hang around to find out ifthere is truth to our
suspicions“ (emphasis mine 227). In court, under oath he affirms that after
Jewel’s abduction he conducted a search “...which I caused to be made for her”
(259). Henson is the last person to testify, and being the expert and official/legal
knower of all facts, his testimony is unimpeachable. The reader knows his
information comes from Venus, who remains legally voiceless but whose actual
voice and actions can transform lives and serve as the proof needed to free one
white men and incriminate two others. Henson takes full credit for discovering
facts for many reasons but his voice is an extension of Venus'. Racism
(institutional and otherwise), manly ego, sexism and the mood in the courtroom
prevent Henson from giving credit to Venus. This public disregard of Venus
creates a doubt as to whether he is wholeheartedly ready to accept his former
colored wife—to re-bestow upon her the sainted surname of Enson. In short,
Henson still has doubts and uncertaintities with his plantation antebellum beliefs
and the changing status of Negroes in America.

E. Higginbotham astutely observes that “racial meanings were never
internalized by blacks and whites in an identical way“ (13). Female characters in
Hagar's Daggm are mindful of race, gender, class, and (in the case of Venus

and this reader) language and their impact on women's lives. I do not think

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Venus was making a comic idiot of herself in Henson’s office. It is certainly
within the realm of possibility that, rather than accept the information and aid
from an “uppity“ servant-class Negro gel, the head of the secret service could
allow a rich man’s darling debutante daughter to rot in captivity. Albeit white, the
kidnapped is after all only a woman. Venus, then, speaks Plantation Creole
using all of its accompanying gestures to put detective Henson at ease, causing
him to think it is his/their idea to take action. Plantation Creole does not represent
ignorance or shame for Venus because it was her first language and the
language of her family.

In a discussion of Hopkins construction of heroes and heroines in other
works, Carol Allen deduces that “if Hopkins used external characteristics as the
predominant means of conveying internal traits, then she also transposed these
general assumptions for her own means, turning the Euro-American defined
negative connotations of black physical characteristics into heroic attributes“ (36).
Though Venus’ voice is muted in court her grandmother is allowed to testify.

Brooks believes that “Hopkins draws attention to Aunt Henny’s ‘peculiar’
language in order to amuse her readers” (145). When Venus rescues Jewel she
delivers her grandmother, Aunt Henny, to safety as well. Henny in her capacity
as cleaning woman witnessed Bradford’s murder and her murderer. The
murderer wanted Henny killed because she could identify him; however, her ner-
do-well son-in-law could not bring himself to kill his mother-in-law. Initially, when
she takes the stand to testify the courtroom is amused. The judge needs

Governor Lowe to interpret Aunt Henny's Plantation Creole. Brooks states:

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This miscommunication is not simply a matter of differing language
usage or pronunciation; Governor Lowe’s indulgent act of
translation effects a two-way conversation between the white men,
while Aunt Henny is left in the position of a curiously speaking
object whose words require mediation. Readers are thus
encouraged to laugh at Aunt Henny but at the same
time—consistent with minstrel humor—they are also encouraged to
laugh at the Governor's grandiloquence... Aunt Henny’s presence,
not her subjective commentary is indeed the medium through which
readers find amusement at the expense of the aristocratic character
in this scene (145).

For example Henny states:

“’I hern people talkin’ in one ob de rooms—the private
office—an’ l goes’ cross de entry en’ peeks roun’ de corner ob de
po’ter—"'

“’The what?’ interrupted the judge.

‘Po’ter massa jedge; don’t yer kno’ what a po’ter am?’

‘She means, portiére, your honor,’ explained Gov. Lowe,
with a smile. ‘Go on, aunty'“ (254).

However, Henny demonstrates her ability to speak standard English during her
testimony. Hopkins italicizes Henny’s quote “’My God, Charles, you’ve pizened. ”’
(255). Though Henny mimics Bradford it demonstrates her capability to duplicate
southern white speech while simultaneously indicating that she prefers speakin

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'I

Plantation Creole. Henny's life is spent in service to southern whites; one
assumes Bradford (who was not her employer) is certainly not the only white
person whose speech she can recreate.

In conduct unbecoming of a mammy figure, Henny testifying in court
accuses a respected white man of lying, exposes his true identity, and is an eye
witness to his act of murder. She does this, while as the narrator states making
“a weird picture, her large eyes peering out from behind the silver-bowed
glasses, her turbaned head and large, gold hoop earrings, and a spotless white
handkerchief crossed on her breast over the neat gingham dress“ (255). This
description is interesting for many reasons. Henny’s head is not hung and her
eyes are not downcast; the passage makes one Mrs of black kinesics and “the
informal codes that operated to regulate social interaction” of African Americans
in public (31110: 66). The fact that her head is wrapped also suggests that Henny
viewed this event as minimel3. Henny’s language and fashion aesthetic
demonstrate that she, like her granddaughter, claim social and cultural space in
direct purview of whites.

At the conclusion of Henny’s testimony the narrator states, “the Attomey-
General then took the witness in hand and conducted a skilful cross-examination
without shaking the old women’s testimony” (256). Henny's statements prove the
defendant innocent and gentlemen General Benson guilty. Furthermore, after
the first couple of paragraphs the judge no longer requires mediation concerning
Henny’s observations. He understands enough of her (mis)communicetion, as

does the rest of the court room, to get the gist of her statements. After the close

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of Henny’s declarations the previously amused courtroom no longer perceives
her statements as comic, and seems almost ready to riot: “Instantly a chorus of
voices took up the refrain—‘That's the talk! No nigger’s word against a white
man! This is a white man’s country yet!” (257). Henny may appear to be a
mammy, she may speak like a mammy on occasion but the judge, Governor
Lowe, the entire courtroom and this reader understand at the end of Henny's
testimony that she is there to explain and clarify the unknown to many who
refuse to listen to it from the lips of a black woman.

Aunt Henny, laboring in her position as a cleaning woman, witnesses a
murder. Sexism, racism, classism and linguistic terrorism allow the judge,
defense and prosecuting attorneys to agree to let her take the stand for various
reasons. The prosecutor is aware of the political climate of the community. How
intimidating can an old turbaned head wearing Negro women be in the 18803?
The defense attorney realizes that even a Negro eyewitness to a murder
committed by a white man can, eventually, be dismissed. The courtroom uproar
over the testimony of Henny is plausible. Leon Higginbotham, using Virginia
statute as an example, points out that “in proceedings involving solely blacks,
blacks were allowed to testify in court. But their testimony was admissible only
against blacks. No white men could ever be found guilty of a crime on the word
of a black person“ during the eighteenth century (1978, 58). Many southern
courts continued such a practice well into the twentieth century. Then Hopkins is
taking literary license to make a point. The public cannot deny their ignorance of

Plantation Creole and a belief that its speakers are always comic. Though Venus

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saves the day by rescuing Henny and Jewel it is the multi-voiced Henny who
faces a hostile public and articulates how the crime was committed and more
importantly its’ perpetrator. Testimony, apparently, is beyond the pale for the
senator's daughter and other victim, Jewel Bowen. The hostile courtroom
population would be most sympathetic to the flawless Jewel. The critics go
beyond what happens in the novel allowing Henny to be viewed as a minstrel or
comic character.

Hopkins creates a situation where a former slave woman testifies against
a former master, a man she wet nursed as a baby and nurtured as a boy. I think
Hopkins demonstrates the great strength of Negro women speaking in a public
forum; furthermore, she illustrates the achievement and courage involved in the
act of speaking for Negro women. Although the risk existed that Plantation
Creole speaking Negro women would be thought comic or quaint from fictional
nanatives to actual personal narratives, they spoke up and out, articulating the
desires, wants and needs of their family, friends, employers but most of all
themselves. Though Carby characterizes Venus as a masculinized female, like
Aurelia, she asserts that “Venus made the transition from minor character to
heroine when she determined to find Jewel’s kidnapper' (149). Aurelia, however,
is less a heroine and more of a provocative nineteenth-century woman character.
She is an unashamed grifter who wants to live comfortably, honestly and
peacefully with a man of her choosing. Hopkins allows Aurelia to escape
Sumner and prosecution. Although Aurelia hates her maternal connection to
Negro race, when confronted with the truth of her biology Aurelia does not lie.

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Perhaps Hopkins allows Aurelia to survive because the greater crime is what was
done to Aurelia; therefore, a reader can imagine a happy future for the self-
confident Aurelia.
Aurelia differs from Estelle or Jewel by the use of her voice. Estelle does
not heed her inner voice:
she was surprised and puzzled at the vague feeling of distrust and
dislike that personal contact with her young guest [Aurelia] brought
to her. It was intangible. She shook it off, however, the beautiful
face and voice were so enchanting that she could not resist them,
and felt ashamed of her distrust (106-107).
Estelle (formerly Hagar) freely speaks only to her husband and daughter. To
some members of the public she appears frigid. Benson melts her facade and
creates terror when he says he knows her true identity. Benson, who some
twenty years earlier was St. Clair Enson, recognizes Hagar is now before him
“passing“ for Estelle Bowen. “Uncontrollable terror had spread over Mrs.
Bowen’s features at these words. Her lips moved but gave forth no sound“ (207).
Benson claims to know her true identity when first introduced to her; how could
she not know him? After he whispers her secrets in her ear she says “’I admit
nothing; I deny nothing. Prove it if you can,’ she muttered in a strained tone“
(207). She is unable to utilize her full voice as Estelle Bowen. Finally, when
confronted with the truth of her identity she can only mutter. And like Henny after
witnessing Bradford’s murder, Estelle faints. I am reminded of Estelle’s vow to

Zena after he proposes marriage: “She accepted his offer, vowing he should

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never have cause to regret his act One might have thought from her eager
acceptance that in it she found escape, liberty, hope“ (81). The authorial voice
implies that in accepting his proposal and making her vow she loses something
of herself—some of the marks against her... (Prior to becoming Mrs. Bowen,
Estelle had taken on the surname of Marks.) WlthOUt persuasion, Estelle gives
up her voice. Why?

Hagar she becomes verbose when she learns her true identity. As a
waitress she certainly had to speak up but as Mrs. Estelle Bowen, the Senator's
wife, she lost the voice she exercised as the enslaved Hagar. She abandoned
her identity as Hagar. This also means she had to give-up her voice.
Interestingly, Hopkins limits Hagar to giving birth only once. In returning to
Washington D. C. with her family she is likely to meet with individuals who knew
her as Hagar, presumably. Yet, she does return. She reserves her voice for the
elevation of her husband and the needs of her step-daughter.

Hopkins confiates and further complicates the issue of mulattas and their
subsequent tragedy by making her women trickster figures who manipulate the
strong and reverse the normal structure of power and prestige. Like Aurelia,
Henny is also raised without benefit of a mother. Aurelia is non nurturing and
consistently described as lonely. She survives. Jewel, constantly given maternal
nurturing, is betrayed, exposed and dies. Estelle, though, beautiful, is viewed as
frigid or icy. The issue of her race certainly comes up indirectly. Like Ellis’ vow
to Hagar, Estelle makes a vow to Zenas Bowen before they wed. The narrator
tells the reader:

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Estelle Marks, as she was called, was an honorable woman who
would not betray his confidence. She accepted his offer, vowing he
should never have cause to regret his act. One might have thought
from her eager acceptance that in it she found escape, liberty, hope
(81).

Estelle Marks Bowen’s true identity is Hagar Sergeant Enson. Her vow is similar

to the one Ellis made to her over ten-years previously. In obscuring her identity

does she pass for white? The reader knows that unlike Ellis, Estelle kept her

vow to Bowen. The narrator observes:

He had never regretted the step. Estelle was a mother to

the motherless child, and being a well-educated woman, versed in
the usages of polite society, despite her recent position as a
waitress in a hotel, soon had Jewel at a first-class school, where
she could be fitted for the position that her father’s wealth would
give her. Nor did Estelle’s good work end there. She recognized
her husband’s sterling worth in business and morals, and insisted
upon his entering the arena of politics. Thanks to her cleverness,
he made no mistakes and many hits which no one thought of
tracing to his wife’s rare talents...Mrs. Bowen simply fulfilled
woman’s mission in making her husband’s career successful by the
exercise of her own intuitive powers (81-82).

Hopkins demonstrates that the issue of race is one that Aurelia/Amelia must

address in her relationships. Once Hagar loses the protection of the Sergeant

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family and her husband Enson, race is also an issue that she too has to address.
It appears that when the opportunity to marry another affluent man Estelle
believed it best to forget her ethnic past. Apparently when she decided to forget
parts of her past she included the appearance of her former brother—in-law and
his partner in crime Walker/Madison. When he is first introduced to her at a
dance, “a puzzled look swept over his face“, however, Estelle merely noticed him
noticing her (114). As if using an authorial jab the narrator observes: “...there
was no change in the beautiful cold face of the elegant woman of the world save
that one might have imagined that she grew whiter, if possible“ (114). In
marrying Bowen it appears that Ester does find escape in secrets, memory loss
and voicelessness.

When Benson, aka St. Clair, confronts and torrnents Estelle with the fact
of her past she is rendered voiceless and faints: “’I knew you instantly the first
night I saw you in this house. This girl is not your child; why should you care. I
have no desire to harm you’“ (207). The narrator observes “Uncontrollable terror
had spread over Mrs. Bowen's features at these words. Her lips moved but gave
forth no sound“ (207). Enjoying his torment of her, Benson “bent toward her and
whispered in her ear. That whisper seemed to arouse her benumbemd faculties.
She moved toward him with disheveled hair, foaming lips and one arm
outstretched in menace...’”l admit nothing; I deny nothing. Prove it if you can,’
she muttered in a strained tone” (207). After he leaves she faints.

Estelle Bowen cannot escape her reality as Hagar Ellis. Hopkins enjoys

changing the names of her characters or the masquerade. Many of her

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characters assume the identity of others. Ostensibly, Estelle participated in
masquerade. If she wished to pass she needed another lifestyle, one with less
access to the public. There is always a chance of being recognized but more so
when one is in the public eye. Estelle is in disguise. She repressed the voice
she gained with her full identity as Hagar, it appears, for a life of comfort and
affluence. On the other hand St. Clair/Benson and MadisonNValker only change
names their personalities remain, for me most part, the same. Hopkins’ women
of deeper hues do not generally participate in masquerade with the exception of
Venus. She is able to switch gender and an age group. Linguisticelly speaking,
however, Venus and Marthy participate in passing. Plantation Creole or Black
English allows them to pass unnoticed as unique characters or to be found
childlike and amusing among the ruling culture. Likewise, this language has also
allowed other characters to pass unnoticed or without critical attention in other
works of fiction as well. Masquerade is significant in Hopkins’ novels perhaps
because when the disguise has served its purpose the reader must acknowledge
and contextualize who or what remains.

Venus, Henny and Aurelia are the speakerly heroines of Liam
Daggmer. All three women represent the sassy voices of narrative women who

confront an unaccepting public.

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Notes

 

1 See Gen. 16-21, forthe story ofHagar and Sarah.

2 J. L. Dillard, ;

 

Vlntage, 1973) defines diglossia as “the use of different languages (or dialects) for different
purposes“ 301.

3 Though pmdures were not uniform, during slavery, slave women removed the strings
and bendanna’s from their hair when going to church or a wedding, for example. Usually on
Monday, the women would rethread or braid their hair and apply a clean head wrap. For further

 

WM (Imaoo: Cornell UP. 1998) 57-58; and John Thornton. Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992)

 

who finds “that women in this new AfroaAflantic community began wrapping their heads, in
contrast with the nearly universal bareheadedness of early descriptions of Africa in which hair
design was the most important element of bodily decoration and could still be found among some
early slaves, as in Jamaica. Perhaps the covering of the head was a sign of Christian
conversion, where heads must be covered In the mass. Perhaps it was the result of the racially
mixed new population of the coast and islands, because the hair form was looser and straighter
and thus did not hold plaits as well“ (233).

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Chapter 4
JESSIE REDMON FAUSET’S NOVELS, CRITICS, AND SURVIVING WOMEN
...Fauset implicitly challenges the very notion of the real and the authentic; she
questions the possibility of the production of a ‘real’ black art in a white-controlled
cultural market. For not only do white culture keepers determine what authentic
black art is, they control the who, how, where, and when of public cultural

production and consumption as well.
Ann duCiIIe. W

In part of There Ie Cenfueion, the first novel by, Jessie Redmon Fauset
unbraids the history of two families of Byes. “As far back as the last decades of
the eighteenth century there had been white Byes and black Byes in
Philadelphia. The black Byes were known to be the chattels of Aaron and Dinah
Bye, Quakers, who without reluctance had set free their slaves“ (22). The
narrator tells that freedom came in 1780 not because of Aaron’s ethics,
philosophical beliefs or his magnanimous nature but “according to the laws of
Pennsylvania, which thus allowed the Quakers to salve their consciences without
offending their thrifty instincts” (22). To its credit Pennsylvania was “the first state
to abolish slavery in the eighteenth century by legislative enactment” in 1780 with
“An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery“ (Higginbotham In the Matter :5
egg, 299). Since, as the narrator states, freedom was conferred according to
the 1780 laws, “those who were already slaves when the statute was passed
were not freed by its enactment; only the black and mulatto children born after

the passage of the law were to be freed and those only after serving their

153

mothers’ masters for twenty-eight years“ (Higginbotham In fig Metter of Cele:
299). Fauset reminds a reader in Thea Ie Conf_ueien that Quakers held slaves
and were not eager to let go of their slave holding traditions. Likewise, in her
Preface to em Harriet Wilson unapologetically offers unflattering comments
on abolitionists, and Pauline Hopkins challenges the sincerity of some Northern
liberals with Sumner a character in Hegar's Daughter. It is interesting that
Fauset, like her sister writers discussed in previous chapters, reserve space in
her literature to remind a reader to be inquisitive about history and its
relationship, specifically, to African American women.

After slavery, in There le Qenfleien, the closer a woman’s connection to a
patriarch, the more complete her identity and financial standing. The reader is
not given first names of the maternal figures in the families of the Marshalls and
the Ellersleys. During the antebellum and Reconstruction period, for Fauset's
women, the familial proximity of Negro women to white or Negro males can mean
the difference between invisibility and visibility. Invisibility indicates a missing
identity. The degree of visibility or invisibility is represented by partial or full
names. Marriage with a Negro male or children with a white male increases the
social identity of a Negro woman and her progeny. To become visible she must
become the silent object for white men or the wife of black men. Marriage kept
Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Ellersley from total namelessness. Fauset's feminist
fictional voice is subtle. One needs to think about who and what she attempts to
recreate and their consequential messages. Overall her many individual fictional

females may not appear prominent but as a community of women they make

154

bold statements about American history, the lives many women were forced to
live and strategies to improve their lives. To her credit, Fauset does not suggest
that all women want or expect to change their conditions, but for those who do
she offers encouragement and direction. The new generation of daughters,
Maggie and Joanna, must avoid the namelessness of their mothers and
grandmothers. Judy Bye and subsequent Bye women have first and last names.
Peter Bye’s mother is Alice Graves. His incestuous maternal lineage represents
the privilege and oppression of some white women.

The Graves Family History begins with two unnamed white sisters in love
with two of their father’s black slaves, during the eighteenth century, who ran
away to marry. Both families had numerous children. The townsfolk (black and
white) had nothing to do with them so cousins married cousins.

The children of each generation did the same, whether driven to it
by like necessity or not, ...But by the time me next brood appeared
a precedent had been established, and Graves married Graves not
only as a matter of course, but as a matter of pride. They were
able to do this, being automatically rendered free by the fact that a
white woman had married a black man (37).
According to the law, the ability to enslave or manumit children was based on the
race of the mother. Generations of Graves, traced back to the two unnamed
white sisters, were free by law. The two nameless sisters brought shame on
their family. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Win the Plenfitjen Hogghelg, states,

“during the antebellum period young women were expected to move within a

155

highly circumscribed world in which their fathers’ and brothers’ honor guaranteed
their safety“ (208). In addition, she finds, “That some southern white women took
black lovers could be freely acknowledged, for it was assumed that the women
were lower class and disreputable. But ladies?“ (208). The Graves sisters, one
could assume, were true women from a wealthy family. Their choice of
husbands brought their family into dishonor. Their interracial marriage strips
them from membership in the cult of true womanhood. They are denied first
names. Although nameless, the two sisters and their offspring were protected by
jurist patriarchs who had the last word on one’s freedom or bondage.
Gravestown provides history and proof of the family’s legacy of freedom. The
history of Gravestown is another example of the power of terrorism and
reproduction. Peter Bye is the future husband of Joanna Marshall. After his
father, Meriwether Bye, a scoundrel, dies, he lives with his maiden aunt Susan
Graves. Miss Graves is a proud member of “the Graves family of Gravestown,
New Jersey, a clan well known to colored people not only in that vicinity, but also
throughout Pennsylvania“ (37). Unfortunately, there were not enough Graves for
Susan to marry. The narrator states “Yet Miss Susan Graves, in spite of three
other offers soared on family pride above all this and made her career that of
housekeeper for the family of a wealthy merchant on Girard Avenue, in
Philadelphia“ (37). As an adult female during the nineteenth century, Miss
Graves rejects tradition (the cult of true womanhood) and makes a conscious

decision to remain single. Nevertheless, away from Gravestown and incest,

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Susan is a single Negro woman, who performs domestic work typical of colored
women.

Susan Graves’ two significant choices indicate she is a survivor, not a
victim. Susan disregards the stigma of being labeled an ‘old maid’ and exercises
her option to remain single. When Peter is orphaned she assumes responsibility
for him. Susan becomes an othermother. Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist
Ih_qegm, describes an otherrnother as a woman other than the birth mother, who
assumes responsibility for abandoned or orphaned children. When slave
children were sold away from their birth mothers other slave took responsibility
for them. In parenting, Collins states, “Notions of property, child care, and
gender differences in parenting styles are embedded in the institutional
arrangements of any given political economy“ (122-123). In addition, Susan’s
caring for Peter challenges “one fundamental assumption underlying the
capitalist system itself: that children are “private property' and can be disposed of
as such“ (Collins 122). Susan Graves represents a more inclusive model for
women.

Most of Fauset’s characters who happen to be mothers are less than the
ideal maternal figures. Fauset challenges the notion of nurturing mammies with
mothers who have lives, interests and commitments beyond their children and
families. In Imre ls Qenfueien, the formerly enslaved Judy Bye never revealed
the truth to her son, Mrs. Ellersley (working-poor) is too busy working to care for
her daughter, Maggie, and Mrs. Marshall (upper middle-class) is a good natumd

flat-character who has four children and says “yes“ to whatever her children

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need. Notably she does train her sons to perform housework. Sarah Strange, in
The thnaeeg Trg, is preoccupied with her miscegenistic relationship with the
Colonel and after he dies she is too haunted with the memory of her moments
with the Colonel to offer their love-child, Laurentine, the support she nwds.
Ironically, Sarah’s job, after accepting the Colonels advances, moves from a
domestic slave to a freed woman waiting for him in the house he bought for
them. Working-class Judy, Sarah’s sister, sends her daughter, Melissa, to her
Strange relatives so that Judy can move to Chicago and enjoy the pleasure of
the new man she intends to wed. The widow Forten continues to cater but instills
her hatred and secret family feud in her solemn daughters. Malory, her son, said
“’I remember my mother used to say to my sisters ‘I never want to hear the name
Strange mentioned under this roof.’ She was so queer about it, her voice was—it
frightened me’“ (261). In Plum Bun, Mattie Ford Murray, who comes from
humble beginnings, is a mother with many foibles but one who at one point
deliberately ignores her husband and daughter, Vlrginia, because of their darker
complexions. Fauset attempts to use her novelistic voice to appeal to women.
She creates scenarios to amuse, instruct and enrich working-class women.
However, misrepresentations of Fauset's life and popular criticisms of her work
persuade working-class women that her novels are unconcerned with working
women.

In any comprehensive study of the literary energy and activity of the
Harlem Renaissance one must include the person and works of Jessie Redmon

Fauset. According to some critics and for reasons to be touched on in this

158

chapter, Fauset’s perceived upbringing is synonymous with her fiction according
to some critics. According to Nathan Huggins she “tried to project the Negro
image in very conventional terms. lndmd, it was her intended purpose in writing
novels to place the Negro in the context of standard American life“ (146). The
only novel of Fauset’s that Huggins looks at is W. He goes on
to point out that in her novel Fauset, like Nelle Larsen, moves away from the
conventional genteel formula. Ultimately, he finds that Fauset is preoccupied
with respectability and views “Negro life as peculiarly strict and confining“ and
therefore, “she was not able to abandon herself to an uncritical acceptance of
black primitivism“ (160). Huggins observation harkens back to a 1932 article by
Marion L. Starkey, who reveals that Fauset had a difficult time getting her first
novel published because “it contains no description of Harlem dives, no race riot,
no picturesque, abject poverty“ (219). As a critic representing the early 19703
sensibilities of African American literature, Huggins finds that Fauset
appropriates a unique formula but continued to portray Negroes in conventional
terms.
In his 1989 study of the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis

claims the following:

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s influence upon the Harlem Renaissance

was not as great as Charles Johnson’s, or as well-advertised as

Alain Locke’s or Walter White’s. Yet, for honesty and precocity, it

was probably unequalled. Wlth the exception of James Weldon

Johnson, she knew a good deal more about the world of literature

159

than the academics and civil libertarians in Harlem who were
becoming overnight experts (121).

Lewis asserts (nineteen years after Huggins) that “There is no telling what she
would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable
efficiency at any task“ (121). At the time her first novel, flare is Confusion, was
published, Mary White Ovington in her “Book Chat“ column queried if “”this
colored world that Miss Fauset draws” really existed“ (Lewis 124). Yet Bontemps
finds that “in spite of her [Fauset] acceptance of the sense of values of the white
world, her novels are full of references to racial problems and bitterness toward
the injustice done by the whites to her race“ (69). One would think that Fauset's
novels only reflect the genteel practices of Negroes. Furthermore, according to
critics one would expect that her so-called conventional novels did not address
women’s issues or reflect Africanisms. Carol Allen asserts in her 1998
publication, Black Women Intellectuals, that “Fauset features black female
figures; so, women should remain at the fore of any analysis of her work“ (48-49).
Many critics refused to acknowledge the diversity and significance of women in
her novels because many wanted and expected Fauset herself to be limited,
stilted and totally embracing of a particular type of black bourgeoisie culture.

Ostensibly, the perception of Fauset’s familial background and social class
somehow get connected to her novels and often cause post-Harlem
Renaissance critics to summarize them in a singular fashion. During the Harlem
Renaissance, Claude McKay wrote Walter White, during December of 1924, that

“Jessie is too prim school-marmIsh and stilted for me“ (Lewis 124). In retrospect

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Lewis finds that in 1920 “had she been younger when she moved to New York,
Jessie Fauset’s own capacity for reaching out to new ideas and new forms might
have been far greater. But she was already an unmarried, proper, thirty-eight-
year-old Washington schoolteacher“ (122). Yet when her first novel was
published, reviews were generally favorable. For example the W

lntemational Book Review finds that Fauset “neither demands nor makes any

I” -. mush-1
r .
A ~—

sentimental concessions. She possesses the critical insight and resolute
detachment of the novelist, and her picture of the society which her novel
surveys is achieved with an art as impersonal as that of Mrs. Wharton. Her novel
is neither propaganda nor apology but art“ (qtd in Sylvander 71-72). Writers and
critics like Stanley Braithwaite and Benjamin Brewley disliked “ghetto realism”
that was included in many works by Renaissance writers. Consequently,
Braithwaite “preferred the novels of Jessie Fauset, which described the lives of
middle- and upper-class blacks, to the novels and poetry of McKay, Langston
Hughes, and other black writers who explored the lower levels of the black
experience“ (Wintz 132). According to Brawley’s understanding Fauset’s four
novels addressed the subject matter that he favored—middle—class Negroes.
“While he observed that not one of her books was a great novel, he commended
them for containing ‘strong situations, and much of tenderness and beauty,” and
for directing their attention to the black middle class, ‘a phase of life, that except
for the work of Chesnutt, had been almost untouched in American fiction” (Wintz
137). At the time she wrote Fauset was esteemed, it appears, for being a

novelist whose work was considered conservative. One suspects that

161

conservative was a term that referred to the portrayal of Negro men and their
families in Fauset's work.
By the 1960s critics’ views changed. Robert Bone, for example,
characterized Fauset’s novels as “unifonnly sophomoric, trivial, and dull“ a flip
assessment that found its place in the criticisms of other scholars (Negrejeyel
in America 101). Lewis finds that There is Confusion was written “to the
approved literacy canons of the Talented Tenth, a sage of the sophisticated in
which French and occasionally German tripped from the protagonists” tongues as
readily as precise English; a novel about people with good bloodlines ...“ (124).
Bontemps agrees with Braithwaite in likening Fauset to the Jane Austen of Negro
literature. According to Bontemps:
The subject matter is the same, and the social status of the
characters is the upper middle class. But when we think of what
creates the dramatic situations in the fiction of these two writers, we
come to realize the vast difference between them. . . In Jessie
Fauset's case, though she chooses a certain class of Negro
people, what really moves the story is not what is inherent to that
class and hence to the character but what is imposed upon the
person from outside (71).

Finally, Bontemps believes that “Jessie Fauset is not a first-rate writer. First of all

she fain to attain whet Alain Locke called ‘the buoyancy from within

compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without,’

though she was not unconscious of what was happening in the Negro world of

162

the 1920s“ (79). Therefore, he finds that strength of Fauset’s novels appear only
when her characters respond to matters away from their comfy middle-class
environment. He seems to suggest that her characters lack inner motivations or
Afrocentric aspects that would make her novels compelling. Tellingly, he
concludes that:

In a way, she shows the tragic situation which faces many of
the black intellectuals: they are making too much of the white world,
so that they can never escape its influence. Even if they try to
create works unique to their race, they do not possess means to
express them. They are deprived of the black soul. Jessie Fauset
has never known the life of the black people of the rural South, nor
the ghettos of the Northern cities. She came from a well-to-do old
Philadelphia family, was educated at Cornell University, where she
majored in French and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
She did her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and
had been to France three times by the time of the publication of her
first novel. The only thing she could do as an artist was to produce
‘uniformly sophomoric, trivial and dull’ novels with almost painful
persistency, to show the world the goodness of the black people
and to ask justice for the race. In her ideas she belongs to the
older school of black writers like Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Hopkins,
who wrote novels to ‘raise the stigma of degradation from [my]

race.’ Miss Fauset never doubted the value of Western civilization.

163

She only wanted her race to have a full share in the civilization“
(79—80).
Bontemps repeats Bone’s unflattering critique of Fauset. Further, he finds that
she cannot escape what Bontemps believes is her elitist upbringing to create
works that “uncorrupted” Negroes—Negroes from the rural South or ghettos of
Northern cities—can relate.

A reader familiar with the critiques of Fauset could very possibly find in her
novels a preoccupation with middle- and upper-class culture. In and of itself
such a focus certainly seems an interesting area for study. (It was for E. Franklin
F rezier.) However, that is not the extent of Fauset's themes. Barbara Christian
held that Fauset “could certainly write with authority about the upper-middle—class
Negro of the day. She herself came from an old Philadelphian family and, in
contrast to most black women of the day, received an extensive formal
education“ (42-43). Christian maintained that Fauset accepted the literary
conventions of the nineteenth-century black novel:

Her heroines are proper light-skinned women who unquestionably
claim propriety as the highest ideal. They pursue the values of
material success through marriage and inevitably believe that
refinement is a reflection of spirituality. As a result, her heroines,
suffer crises because of a social mishap, either of birth or
deportment. Nor does Fauset exercise any critical distance toward

the unimportance of her heroines’ major crises. She too, believes

164

that not being able to take up with the “right people“ is a tragedy
(Black Feminiet lee' ' e“ m 4344).
Again Fauset is held prisoner to an imagined background. Although Christian
unfairly mocks Fauset’s novelistic women, she does acknowledge their
existence.

Fauset’s bourgeoisie Philadelphia background needs to be amended
because as duCille points out “Fauset’s alleged conservatism and elitism have
been perennially at issue“ (Ih_e Queiing Convention 77). She was born in 27
April 1882 in New Jersey, the sevth child of Redmon Fauset and Annie
Seamon Fauset. Redmon Fauset was an African Methodist Episcopal minister
who later married Bella Huff, a widow, after his first wife and Jessie’s mother
(Annie Seamon) died. Huff entered the marriage with three children and three
more children were born as a result of their union. Arthur Huff Fauset, folklorists
and Jessie’s younger brother, recalls that as a family “we were quite poor“
(Sylvander 25). The Fauset’s were middle-class according to attitudes not
economics; and Jessie won a scholarship to Cornell University (Sylvander 26).
Carolyn Sylvander a Fauset biographer, finds that after 1905 the two
characteristics that are evident in Fauset are: “She was a very hard worker,
determined to achieve excellence in whatever she undertook. Accustomed to
being in a racial and sexual minority, she determined to be outstanding by other
criteria as well“ (31). Fauset’s novels demonstrate her preoccupation with
women’s issues, possibilities of achievement for hard-working, intelligent and

young Negro women, how working-class women can increase their status,

165

interest in Black English, slang and middle-class Negro culture. Moreover,
according to Fauset’s background, education and literary accomplishments one
expects that she has a voice that certainly deserves to be heard.

Having read Fauset's first novel, We, without benefit of
related critiques I was impressed with the themes she incorporated in her 1924
novel: a Negro girl unashamed of her kinky hair and refusing hair products to
straighten it, a poor family of women who increased their economic standing as a
result of the drive of its younger member, a protagonist who matured hoping for a
career and not marriage, descendants of two interracial couples who created a
growing family of mulattoes who continued to practice inbreeding because an
antebellum community initially rejected them, spouse abuse, abortion, the right of
women to have and maintain professions and so on. It appears that many critics
worked to deny Fauset a unique novelistic voice in American literature because
they wanted her to be of the Philadelphia manor born and though erudite limited
to a singular and uninspiring literary point of view. Consequently, the messages
her characters (mostly women) convey were ignored.

There e‘ Cenfusion seems to be a prophetic title for Fauset’s first novel as
there seems to be much confusion concerning her life, novelistic voice and all
that goes on in her novels. There Is Cenfusion is a novel about families,
traditional and nontraditional, the impact that American slavery had on the
segregated urban Negro family and consequently how family and its members
survived or perished. The middle-class black family (The Marshall’s) lead the

novel and provide enough characters for Fauset to articulate multiple social and

166

economic options for women. In each novel Fauset includes at least one strong
plot about a single woman usually raised by a poor- or working-class mother in
the tenderloin district—in There Is Confusion, Maggie Ellersley; in em
American eye, Phebe Grant; and in W, several families of
women, The Stranges, Melissa Paul and The Fortens for example. Overall the
woman-headed households in Fauset’s novels sumed in two areas. First they
give voice and vision to families and women that the ruling culture wanbd to
ignore and in Fauset’s hands such families usually managed to achieve
economic security all while subverting the weakened “Cinderella“ folktale,— a
helpless heroine, “a weepy, prostrate young blonde (the instructions here are
quite specific) who must be ‘aroused from her sad revery' by a godmother"1 and
many a prince (Yolen 572). Fauset also mocks the cult of true womanhood.
There seems to be much confusion concerning this novel because critics fail to
acknowledge the messages F auset offers to women through her characters.
Early in There Is anfueion a conversation between the two working-poor
middle-aged women reveals some of the hardships of the helpless Cinderella
ideology. The two marginal characters are Mrs. Ellersley a hard-working
leundress “to whom life had meant nothing but poverty and confusion,“ and her
cousin Mis’ Sparrow, a cook: “hers was a lot which had been hard ever since she
could remember. She was poor, she was week, she was ignorant. Add to that
the fact that she was black in a country where color is a crime and you have her
‘complex’“ (55). Mis’ Sparrow tells the tale of a woman manying up the

economic ladder. “She wan’t nobuddy. Jes’ a little teeny slip of ole white gel.

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No money, no fambly, no nuthin’.” (56). Sparrow makes it clear that the new Mrs.
Proctor came from humble beginnings lacking in social and economic status and
a family. She reinforces the fact that the new wife was poor—“Young Mr.
Proctor’s sister met her in boardin’-school, poorest thing there," (56). The young
prince, in this instance Harry Proctor, was home from college, fell in love at first
sight, and “’jes’ married her. Jes” wouldn’t listen to nobuddy a-tall’“ (56). The
final remark suggests that there was no need for Proctor to marry the nameless
woman as she lacked money and social standing. Moreover, after the wedding
the new Mrs. Proctor achieves status along with her new surname and becomes
an instant member of the cult of true womanhood. However, the new Mrs.
Proctor, unlike Cinderella, is unhappy with her new husband. Mis’ Sparrow
reveals, “’Monia says she don’t even love him. Liked some young travelin’
salesman she’d known all her life. ‘Monia declares she cries about him when
she’s by herself“ (56). It is unlikely that this union will survive “happily ever
after.“ Deborah E. McDowell charges Fauset with using classic fairy tale patterns
and nursery rhymes as protective mimicry “although these stratagems are
consciously employed, they are often clumsily executed“ (87). Other than being
known as previously poor and pining away for a traveling salesman, the new Mrs.
Proctor is given an identity (one shared with her husband’s mother), her voice is
a cry conveyed by another and performed in solitude. Marrying up the economic
ladder, therefore, is not necessarily the ideal situation for a woman.

Mis’ Sparrow’s conveyance of the story suggests that the two, poor,

working-class Negro women did not view marriage as an opportunity to escape

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financial responsibilities—neither aspired to nor thought it a possibility—for
themselves. Mis’ Sparrow is a single woman and her interest in telling the story
is to stress three points concerning the new Mrs. Proctor. she was poor, now
unhappy and loves another man. Though working-poor and a single mother,
Mrs. Ellersley considers herself fortunate to be a widow (57) and mat the new
Mrs. Proctor is lucky in her selection of a marriage partner. Mrs. Ellersley hopes
aloud that her daughter, Maggie, will be just as lucky. Both toiling women also
represent the menial service work met many Negro women were forced to
perform. However, Mrs. Ellersley wants her daughter to have a better life, one
without drudgery. Her twelve-year old Maggie, overhears the story and wonders
aloud why Mrs. Proctor marrbd him? Mis’ Sparrow explains “’H’m child, wouldn’t
you do anything to get away f’um hard work, an’ ugly cloes an’ bills? Some w’ite
folks has it most as bad as us poor colored people. On’y thing is they has more
opporchunities’“ (sic 56). Mis’ Sparrow’s observation suggests that although
some whites may be forced to labor they have more opportunities to change their
status based on their skin tone. If the new Mrs. Proctor was a Negro she could
not be considered a true woman. “Fauset criticizes a society that encourages
women to dissemble, to assume, uncritically, insulting and degrading forms of
behavior in exchange for the so-called privilege of marriage“ (McDowell 92).
Nevertheless, believing that such a situation was far removed from Maggie, Mis’

Sparrow did not respond to Mrs. Ellersley wishful remark about Maggie getting
lucky.

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In Com_eqy American Style, Fauset again flips the script on the Cinderella
theme. Llewellyn Nash, the rich, white, playboy instantly falls in love with Phebe.
After having lunch with her he thinks “how wonderful it would be to have this
lovely, vibrant, gallant creature forever beside one. . .An hour spent with Phebe
was the equivalent of a combination of ozone, champagne, ambrosia, the waters
of the Fountain of Youth all poured in some classical goblet and mixed and
blessed by some beneficent god“ (255). Phebe thought Nash’s preoccupation
with her was his way of slumming. She tells Nicholas “’He’s [Nash] so
amusing...and insincere. It’s quite patent that he’s amusing himself with the poor
working girl..., What he doesn’t know is that I’m amusing myself with the grand
white folks. Of course if he were the least bit serious I’d be feeling very badly'“
(239). Phebe is honest with both Nash and Nicholas. She tells Nash about her
love for Nicholas. From the previous quotation, she let Nicholas know about her
flirtation with Nash. At one point, as she leaves Nash to meet with Nicholas and
there is an allusion to Cinderella and her slipper: “In a few hours now, she
thought, tripping along the street like some girl in the pictured advertisement of
the perfect shoe...in a few hours all this heady anticipation would be resolved
into realization“ (255). Unlike the new Mrs. Proctor (Ieeg Is Cenegeion) a
marriage between Phebe and Nash would not permit her entry into the cult of
true womanhood, particularly, since Phebe insists on telling folk she is a Negro.

Fauset’s novels play with the notion of women marrying and living happily
ever after. Nash reveals that he does love Phebe and wants to marry her. Like

the new Mrs. Proctor in There ie Qenfueioe a woman can marry up the economic

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ladder if she is white. However, Phebe immediately reveals her heritage to
Nash. “Nash can marry a poor girl, a shop girl, an illegitimate girl, but he cannot
marry a girl of invisible Black blood, thought he does offer Phebe a permanent
mistress-ship in his life“ (Sylvander 216). Fauset is explicit in letting women
know that there is an antithesis to “happily ever after.“ In Me
Sm Christopher Cary, who later marries Phebe, recalls that his sister, “T eresa
had married a Frenchman in Toulouse, “and lived unhappily ever after,’ he used
sometimes to mutter to himself’ (263). Teresa is a character who is taught to be
obedient, programmed to pass for white and to please her demanding mother. In
Fauset's novels dependence means vulnerability for many women. The positive
or negative aspects of their vulnerability is contingent on the self-confidence of
the women.

In Thea ls Qnfleien the narrator finds that young Maggie’s charm
lessened “when she opened her pretty mouth. She disclosed herself then for
what she was, a true daughter of the Tenderloin” (58). Ostensibly, with the
Ellersleys and Mis’ Sparrow, Fauset recreates characters who appear to speak
Black English. Like Hopkins, many of her Negro poor or working class fictional
characters are Ebonic speakers. The narrator claims “Something within her frail
bosom pulsed in a constant revolt against the spirit of things that kept her in
these conditions“ (58). In standard English Maggie vows to her mother “’I will not
always live like this, Ma—I’Il get out of it some way.” (58). Unlike Venus in
Hopkins, Heger’e Deeghter, Maggie does not switch between Black and standard
English. Maggie eventually begins to speak only standard English.

171

Fauset’s Ebonic speaking characters are all hardworking and well aware
of conditions around them. With Pelasgie in MM, for example,
Fauset emphasizes that she is a “decent girl“ who earns an “honest Iivin’“ (234).
In The Chinabem T3, many working-class characters speak Black
English—Mr. Johnathan Stede, his daughter Johnasteen, and as mentioned
previously his niece Pelasgie Stede—for example. Stede works for Sarah
Shange, his daughter works for Laurentine and Pelasgie works for the Brown
family. Pelasgie’s jealousy is featured in most of her comments: “’for them
hinckty, cullud folks, thinks-themese’fs-so-much’“ (232). She usually focuses
her rage in the direction of Melissa, the youngest member of the Strange women.
Pelasgie fumes, “’many's the time I bels like goin’ to her with her fine airs and
tellin’ her I may not be the high yaller she is, but at least if I'm black I’m honest.
My family ain’t never been mixed up with white folks yit‘“ (233). Fauset seems to
have an ear for the speech of others. After Malory reads a passage from Hardy,
the narrator observes, “He read well and with pleasure Hardy’s homely verses
with their strangely turned diction, their rugged sincerity“ (226-227). Away from
Red Brook Melissa and Johnasteen were delivering dresses when they stapped
at “a little shack back from the road, where they had soft drinks“ (173). The
countennan’s speech differed from standard English, “’Don’t you girls wants to
eat a sandwich or something with your sassparella? You c”n take it right in and
eat it at them tables there.’ I suppose he wanted us to know that we could eat
there even though we were colored“ (173). Perhaps the counterrnan’s speech

was to reflect an Irish American heritage; nevertheless, Fauset does demonstrate

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her understanding that individuals have different languages and dialects.
Though an individual's language or dialect differs from standard English in
Fauset’s fiction it is not an indication that one is unintelligent or comedic. For
example, Mrs. Ellersley and Mis’ Sparrow ( I l_1ere ls Coneleim) both speak Black
English and both are hardworking women. The reader recognizes both women
as being practical in their lives and direct in their communication style. In
CW Henry an engineering student and Teresa’s former
fiance, attends Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he speaks Black
English. Teresa “loved him to relapse into the soft lingo of the southern
immigrant whom he mimicked so perfectly“ (94). It is likely that Henry becoming
comfortable begins to speak in a way that was natural and comfortable for him.
Interestingly, Fauset, as a Harlem Renaissance writer, seems to have entemd
the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) debate via her novels
unnoticed:
...the role of the vernacular in African American life and literature
has been a source of debate among African Americans for more
than a century...During the Harlem Renaissance of the 19203, a
similar debate raged among the black intelligentsia, with Langston
Hughes endorsing and exemplifying the use of vernacular, and
Alain Locke and others suggesting that African Americans ought to
put the quaintness of the idiom behind them and offer the world a
more “refined“ view of their culture. These enduring attitudes

reflect the attraction-repulsion dynamic, the oscillation between

173

black and white (or mainstream poles that W. E. B. Du Bois defined

a century ago as “double-consciousness“ (Rickford 8. Rickford 9).
Popular critics of Fauset’s fiction generally prefer to view her work as
conventional; therefore, many only notice that her characters speak standard
English.

The refined members of the middle and upper-class Negro community in
several of Fauset’s novels enjoy using slang. Fauset makes a distinction
between black English and slang. The narrator in The thnegey T53 says
Gertrude Brown “had a great habit of using words correctly even when
communing with herself, slang with her was an acquisition, a deliberate one; she
was really an intellectual“ (285). Melissa enjoys Mallory’s use of slang; “’It
sounds so funny for you to talk slang and yet be so precise about it’“ (259). Aunt
Vlny (Malory’s aunt) a senior citizen and a revered Philadelphia Negro enjoyed
“’raising sand,’ (Aunt Vlny's equivalent for the modern ‘whoopee,’)“ (188). Even
masquerading Teresa, from Com Amerign Slide uses slang on occasion
when she speaks (97). The various uses of language are so subtle in Fauset‘s
novels that when one reviews its use one becomes aware of economic class

distinctions. In Talkin That Talk sociolinguist Geneva Smithennan indicates:

 

The sociolinguistic construction of reality in the class system of the
US is made more complex by the contradiction of black and white
English which are the same and not the same. White English (aka
standard English) is that language spoken by power elites and

those who aspire to upward social mobility; non-standard English is

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that language spoken by working-class whites; black English is that
language spoken by African Americans. Significant and profound
social and economic distinctions accompany each of these three
linguistic phenomena (99).
Currently, studies show that “at some point in their lives, 90 percent of African
Americans use some aspect of US Ebonics” (Smithennan W 151).
Black English, during the time Fauset wrote, certainly would not be foreign to her
potential readers. Rickford and Rickford find “the caravan of black storytellers
who spun yarns with the vernacular did so because they acknowledged, publicly
or privately, that ‘homely’ speech patterns carried currency in their own
community, as in American fiction and popular culture“ (16). Although Fauset,
like many other writers, is unable to accurately recreate AAVE she recognized it
as an important social issue and cultural aspect related to Negroes. Other
writers shunned the use of “Black dialect“ probably because whites had
misrepresented it—et times suggesting that such speakers were illiterate or
humorous: “Black lawyer, poet, and novelist James Weldon Johnson (1871-
1938) voiced in 1933 a more fundamental objection to it, as an instrument so
fused to stereotype that it had become a limiting, insurmountable mold“ (Rickford
& Rickford 31). Fauset’s use of Black English highlights a concern that African
Americans have dealt with since before the “17903 when large numbers of blacks
began to attain their freedom“—the behavior of ordinary African Americans
(White & White 102). Fauset also claims the ability to mock middle— and upper-

class society. This is also important considering that during the nineteenth

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century when African Americans in the north claimed their rights other than
physical violence they were targets of humor. “Stories lampooning African
Americans for their pretensions, their behavior, and just about any aspect of their
culture were ubiquitous“ (White & White 106). It is therefore, important that
Fauset tells the story and controls the joke; though most critics missed her
humor.

Fauset’s narrator and authorial voice from time to time make humorous
quips. Ann duCille concurs, finding that critics “have often missed Fauset’s irony,
mistaking parody for praise“ (Ih_e Ceueling Conlention 98). In The thneeeex
flee, Fauset surnames the alienated female family Strange, then plays, puns,
and punctuates her novel with remarks relating to “strange.“ When the Stranges’
niece comes to live with them, the narrator finds that “her place in the community
was a strange one“ (23). Referring to his Aunt Vlny, Malory thinks: “She was an
old woman and had seen many strange things“ (231). Among another group of
individuals, Malory is perceived as “this new and elegant young stranger...lt did
seem too bad for him to come in and have to get mixed up with that ‘passel of
Stranges’“ (242). Accordingly, there are a passel of Stranges, stranges, and
strangers operating in this novel.

There are many remarks about and Fauset enjoys playing with related
concepts concerning bad blood in The Chinabeex Tge. At one point the
narrator signifies on the idea of blue blood. The Browns, an upper-middleclass
family, are together one day when the father remembers that one of his
daughters before maturing “had been positively ugly!“ (279). He now believes

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that both his daughters looked like princesses: “Mrs. Brown murmured something
about ‘blood telling in spite of everything,” very much as though he had buried the
precious fluid under an avalanche of refuse but it, in its bright blueness, had
seeped through after all The blood in question came of course from her side of
the family“ (279). The surname Strange also signifies on the idea of “bad blood.“
What we hear if we listen closely to her prose is Fauset’s critical,
mocking tone, suggesting not sympathy for or accord with the value
systems of her class- and clothes-conscious heroines, as many
critics have insisted, but a kind of aloof derision, perhaps at
moments even disdain, for their self-deception and self-hatred
(duCille 98-99).
Fauset can be heavy handed with the names, ensuring that her reader gets her
point. An example of this is “Mrs. Judge Manners and her lovely and exclusive,
newly-married daughter, Mrs. del Piler" (thnafim 146). It is quite wonderful,
hypothetically, that one who is able to judge manners gives birth to a lady who
marries and becomes “de pillar of de community.“ Fauset constructs these
comic Mes-demos to lightheartedly mock some of the class pretensions of the
segregated blacks in Red Brook. There is a sense of fun and play here. It is
rather unconscionable that one could read such prose and believe that the writer
was being self-righteous.
Ostensibly, Fauset wants her readers to be aware of social and cultural
issues, such as AAVE, and she achieves this sometimes with humorous tongue

in cheek comments. “Colored Philadelphia society is organized as, and even a

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little more carefully than, Philadelphia white society. One wasn’t ‘in’ in those old
days unless one were, first, ‘an old citizen” and, second, unless one were
eminently respectable—almost it might be said God-fearing“ (Ih_ere e’ Qenfusion
31). For example, when Teresa (CeMy Amerign Style) who has neglected to
explain her mother’s racist ways, asks Henry if he will prevent anything from
coming between them: he confidently reassures her that he will meet any
problem. This chapter ends with the narrator's related quip that “his kisses left
her surer of his love than his grammar" (97). There is a farce about a soon to be
middle-class housewife, in Iee Chinegex Ta, looking forward to cleaning as it
will bring the appreciation of her expectant husband. With the help of a
magazine (where many women were given advice on how to be proper
housewives), teenage Melissa imagines that house painting and housekeeping
will be a joy once she is wed to Malory. She exclaims “’I’II be the sweetest
housekeeper! Oh you’re going to love it so. Housekeeping is lots of fun
nowadays if you just know how to go about it. Dust-pans blue as the sky! Yellow
kitchenware’“ (272). Perhaps it was less humorous during the 19303, when
working-class women could focus on their own kitchen ware and domestic
cleaning.

On occasion Fauset’s prose comically employs sexual innuendo. For
example, in the following exchange, from The Chinaber_ry Ta, between
Laurentine, preoccupied with being proper and her doctor boyfriend (Stephen):
“She thought of Melissa, Asshur, the Chinaberry Tree and almost swooned with
satisfaction. But aloud she said, looking toward his shapely, sizable shoes, ‘You

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have good understandings, haven’t you, Stephen?’ And his laughing answer,
“The better to support you with my dear’“ (152). There is also an allusion to Little
Red Riding Hood. Fauset’s humor can be rather risque but to recognize it one
must get beyond the surface conservatism of her work. Hazel V. Carby argues:
ultimately the conservatism of Fauset’s ideology dominates her
texts. In The thnabem Trg, for example, ...the movement of the
text is away from the figures of isolated unmarried mothers and
daughters supporting themselves through their own labor, toward
the articulation of a new morality and community in which black
women were lifted from the abyss of scandal and gossip, which
threatened to overwhelm them, by professional black men who
reinserted them into a newly formed and respectable community as
dependent wives (167).
Conservatism is the facade of Fauset's novels. Along with Fauset’s humor she
also challenges that idea of women eager to marry. Moreover, I challenge
Carby’s reading of The Chinabem Tree. It seems to me that the Strange
women, along with cousin Melissa Paul, in the and decide to remain together and
unmarried. The proof is the first and last paragraph of the novel. The novel
begins like this: “Aunt Sal, Laurentine, and even Melissa loved the house...But
what the three women loved most in that most lovely of places was the
Chinaberry Tree“ (1). In the beginning all the women are connected by their love
of the house. The second paragraph begins the tale of how the Chinaberry Tree

came to rest in Red Brook, New Jersey and the relationship of Aunt Se! and

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Colonel Halloway. Implicitly or explicitly there is not one thread of evidence or
suggestion that the women are married. Further, I have the sense that the
women live there and are not visiting. Clearly, the women are together and have
already experienced the events described in the novel. If the story is linear
Melissa could not exist in the beginning, let alone as a woman. The conclusion
suggests to me that both Laurentine and Melissa have developed a new
relationship and new understanding of self and one another. Fauset very
definitely does not include a description of the women as couples with their
men/husbands but begins the novel with a description of three women who loved
the house.

W concludes with Denleigh and Asshur (single men)
pondering what they can do to make life better for Laurentine and Melissa (single
women), respectively. Specifically, it is Asshur who thinks of marriage: “he would
order their well-being“ (340). However, at the conclusion the narrator focuses on
Laurentine and Melissa who were thinking “on none of these things“ that the men
were thinking about (340). The narrator states:

Caught up in an immense tide of feeling, they were unable to focus
their minds on home, children, their men....Rather like spent
swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had
suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel
of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the
skies above their heads, (340-341).

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The cousins survived a traumatic event, a self-defining event and an event where
they gain more insight into one another. The revelations demonstrated their
sameness moreso than their differences. There is another suggestion in the
novel that the women do not marry. “Laurentine and Melissa looking back in
later safer years on this year in which fate showed itself at its sorriest, often
recalled this season, dwelt on it, relived it: Laurentine with a certain sweet
poignance; Melissa with a familiar pang of terror, a prayerful sense of gratitude“
(236). Again this reflection does not include or imply that the women married. It
does suggest that they remained connected and safe. I maintain that Fauset
kept Laurentine and Melissa single and living together.

Fauset also demonstrates that simply because Denleigh is a doctor does
not make him an ideal mate for Laurentine. Dr. Denleigh tells Laurentine about
her parents and how they loved one another. He maintains that Aunt Sal loved
the Colonel more than her daughter (159). Denleigh freely carries on this
conversation where “she answered reluctantly, ashamed and uneasy at the turn
which the conversation had taken“ (160). Harboring animosity Laurentine
believes that she would have suffered less if her mother had relocated when she
was a child rather than continuing to live in Red Brook, New Jersey and house
the Colonel provided. Denleigh prefers the romantic version when explaining to
Laurentine her mother’s motives and her parent’s love. Denleigh asserts, “She
knew—before long—that she was ruining him. He, loving her more probably
than anything else in the world, knew to what he was consigning her...He
acknowledges her, he provides her with a home—his building it in this town was

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just a flash of dare-deviltry l guess—he sees that you get an education“ (160).
To further enhance his perspicuity of the situation he remarks “You know if she
hadn’t been colored he’d have married her like a shot“ (160). This exchange
primarily where Denleigh is supposedly making Laurentine aware of the passion
between her parents is overtly condescending on his part. She lived and
suffemd in Red Brook for years with her mother and occasional pets on the head
from her father and being rejected by the rest of the town. Laurentine is a
woman who gains standing in the community on her own and earns a living in
which she supports not only herself but her mercurial mother. It is unlikely that
Laurentine would marry a man who finds it necessary to talk down to her,
particularly, since she followed Fauset’s recipe for success—is industrious,
remains tied to her community, yet independent and is an entrepreneur.
Although Laurentine seeks respectability and, initially, believes that she
can attain it from marriage she is less eager to wed Denleigh. He proposes their
elopement; but diplomatically and abruptly she refuses “’you’re sweet
Stephen—talking of marriage—we’re not even engaged I’d have you to know’“
(162). Laurentine knows how to gracefully avoid issues. Ironically, Denleigh was
married previously to a woman, whom he claims, was beautiful and an only
womanchild, “”she was spoilt. . . She didn’t know what self-denial, or self-control
meant’” (157). The now deceased Mrs. Denleigh had several affairs and in his
telling of their life together she lost her identity. Denleigh describes his former
wife from his point of view, without interruptions from the narrator or Laurentine.

He married up the economic ladder and his story of an unfaithful, beautiful,

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spoiled wife who did not appreciate his hard working efforts leaves a reader
curious about this nameless woman. She is not a character to be vilified, for the
reader gets the impression that much is missing from the story. After suffering
such a betrayal the insightful Denleigh makes the following sage statement
“’Everybody should suffer before he marries. Suffering makes for understanding
and clarity more than anything I know’“ (157-158). Laurentine suffers enough to
avoid cohabitation with an individual who sees benefits in suffering.

Allen finds that Fauset “ponders repeatedly the mental development of
young, black female subjects...During this migratory adjustment period, the
subject learns how to adapt emotionally to and accept herself in a racist and
sexist environment“ (49). Fauset speaks moreso through the actions of her
fictional women. She wants her readers to consider the possibilities for success
and happiness. Particularly for young women coming from working-class
woman-centered households Fauset usually offer success formulas. As a
working, single mother, Mrs. Ellersley is so poor she sent Maggie to school
regularly “to save fuel and gas. Evenings she went to the houses where her
mother worked and got her dinner“ (59). The fact that Maggie was frail kept her
from the wage/labor drudgery of her mother and aunt. In addition to her
wage/labor, Mrs. Ellersley also rented out one of their three rooms usually to
train-men. As her mother struggles for their survival Maggie’s belief system
develops. Maggie intends to avoid the drudgery of her mother and cousin.
Young Maggie “had sense enough to know that very often these train-men
stayed poor. They made pretty good money—they did, too, in those days—but

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not enough to save their wives form labor“ (59). However, Mrs. Ellersley
encouraged Maggie in her nubile belief that a well-to-do colored man, easily
identified by his title—minister, doctor or Iawyer,—could save her from a life of
toll. Mis’ Sparrow ignored such speculation from her cousin as she thought it too
far fetched that Maggie would find herself in such a situation. True to her 1
training, Maggie reveals that she wants to meet a prosperous colored man. She f‘
states “’I’m going to meet one,’ ...and henceforth she thought, she dreamed of F
nothing else“ (59). As a teenage girl with romantic notions Maggie vows to meet, i
not marry, an affluent man.
Fauset recognized the work that many Negro women were forced to
perform and she wanted to offer alternative avenues of escape from the
hardships of wage/labor for women. Maggie Ellersley’s goal, in meeting a
moneyed man, seemingly, is to gather information on how to get and maintain
prosperity. As a young woman, Maggie’s desire is “’if you could just get us out of
this awful place, this house, this stmetl If I could just get to know some decent
folks’“ (60). She reveals her aspiration to John Howe, a divinity student that she
and her mother nursed back to health, who wants to show his appreciation to the
Ellersley’s. Fourteen-year old, Maggie advises Howe as to how her plan could
sumad; “Clearly she had nursed her project“ (61). Based on their reputation for
being clean and honest, the installment plan, train men and renting a house on
F ilty-third Street (in New York) Maggie’s plan appeared foolproof. Unfortunately,
Mrs. Ellersley lacked Maggie's vision. When Howe presents the plan to “Mrs.

Ellersley [she] was sure of her livelihood, her mere existence here, but she was

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doubtful about a great venture“ (61). Nevertheless, when Maggie’s scheme
works “It gave Maggie her first insight into the workings of life. If you wanted
things, you thought and thought about them, and when an opportunity offered,
there you were with your mind made up to jump at it“ (62). Although Maggie fails
to acknowledge it, early on she exhibits a successful entrepreneurial spirit and
aptitude. The avenue of escape she attributed to men, she successfully
employed before graduating from high school. Her next goal is to get to know
decent people.

At fourteen, Maggie’s voice is heard and acted upon in a society of
exchange. With the initiation of her voice the material situation of her small
family changes for the better. “Gradually, word of her rooming-house spread
among the better class of transients. All her lodgers gave her their mending to
do, she washed for some of them, gave breakfast to a few chosen spirits, and
they paid willingly and well“ (62). Fauset’s pubescent Cinderella works, speaks
and acts in behalf of her family and herself. Although the Ellersley’s like John
Howe and some of the other transients appeared to be decent/hard-working
individuals, the narrator states “She [Maggie] had a passion for respectability and
decency quite apart from what they connoted of comparative east and comfort,
though she coveted these latter, too, and meant some day to have them“ (64).
Although the rooming house allows the Ellersleys to move to a better
neighborhood they were still struggling with their finances. Mr. Marshall a
successful caterer and father of Maggie’s new friend, Sylvia, offers to loan

Maggie money. She refuses and asks for work—“’I could take orders, count the

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silver, look afler the nepery, pay off the men if you’d care to trust me’“ (68).
During her junior year in high school, Maggie gains practical knowledge,
experience and money as a bookkeeper.

In W, Fauset creates another poor matrifocal family,
the Grant family consists of, Phebe and her mother Sarah who is unmarried.
Phebe exercises her voice early, unhesitant in her revelation to her elementary
school class and teacher that “’I belong to the black or Negro race’“ (35). Her
response caused her teacher to giggle and say “’Well, Phebe, we all know that
isn’t true. Don’t try to be funny. Now tell us what race you belong to, dearl’“ (35).
The nanator describes Phebe as “quiet, intense, independent little girl, made up
of strange loyalties and predilections and almost as single-minded as Olivia
Cary“ (47). Mrs. Grant struggles to make ends meet. They live on a back street
in the rear of the Campbell family (109). The Grant family, like the Ellersley’s,
are members of the working poor. Because the reader is able to identify both
Phebe and her mother, Sarah, by name one can assume Phebe’s father is white.
Her mother worked for Mrs. Morton Rogers yet when Phebe graduates from high
school Rogers decides to send an appreciative Phebe to school for dress design
“this summer and next winter... I’m going to look after her daughters“ clothes
while she’s away....lf she likes me and I make progress, she may set me
up....Pretty nice?” (64). Fauset likes to people her novels with women-centered
families. In W, Sarah Strange’s lifelong intimate affair with
Colonel Halloway netted her a house, a chinaberry tree, his vengeful wife, their

daughter (Laurentine) and her two step-sisters (Phebe and Diane). Bad planning

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on the Colonel’s part almost places the finances of the Stranges in ruin after his
death. Phebe and Diane only appear once in the novel to meet their sister,
Laurentine, and make her an offer: “She would not take money outright. But she
would and could take training. She liked dressmaking and designing and if the
girls would like to help her in her training she would be grateful“ (12).
Consequently, “it was arranged that she should go to Newark for instruction, her
sisters would be responsible for all costs“ (13). Skill and training with design,

needle and thread allow Laurentine to preserve her family in a manner to which

they were accustomed. It allows Phebe, W to increase
her family’s wealth. In W, Maggie cultivates skill in many

occupations, including being a nurse overseas during World War I. The younger
women refuse to take money but are willing to accept training or education to
increase their skills and family finances. Fauset stresses training, independence
and self-reliance to working-class women.
In W, Phebe’s diligence and hard work also
contribute to her financial success and dress shop. She credits Mrs. Rogers:
“...she stood back of me all this time...And of course it isn’t my
shop, not yet, though I do expect to own it some day. I even have a
very small interest in it already. I’d have had more only I wanted to
pay Mrs. Rogers first what I owed her. I’ve finished with that now
though and I’m concentrating on this house. I do want Mother to be
able pretty soon to stop work“ (109-110).

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Phebe is practical and building on a life she wants to maintain. Like Laurentine,
in The thnaeeey Tge, Phebe is achieving this comfortable lifestyle with the
help of another woman. Fauset demonstrates that economic success does not
rest with men. Phebe’s middle-class friend, Teresa however, is oblivious to the
type of commitment Phebe makes to succeed. Nevertheless, Teresa finds her
success wonderful and remarks, “’My goodness! ...Why, Phebe, you’re only a
little bit older than me, aren’t you? And I have never earned a cent yet’“ (110).
Teresa, who comes from a two parent, upper middle-class home, finds earning a
living an impressive achievement and one that she admires. Teresa’s lack of a
voice, work ethic and a manipulative mother all lead to her downfall.
Dependence in middle- or upper-class young Negro men is solved through
marriage. Cary decides he wants to wed Marise, a successful stage actress,
because he believed that she could heal his family. Marise comes from a
middle-class family while Cary’s family is upper-middIe—class. “’Marise, in my
home we are heart-broken, that is my father and I, and only a woman can heal
us....l am asking you to come and be that woman’“ (267). Though insensitive to
the needs of others outside of his family, Cary believes he needs a wife and
totally disregards Marise’s profession and that she is confident and assertive.
Ostensibly, he is offering her something better than being on stage—to be
satisfied with an audience of two ungrateful men—to be handmaiden for he and
his father. Laughable, the reader is told “She could scarcely believe her ears.
‘Wrthout love?“ He replies, “’Wlth a great deal of love...and endless gratitude’“

(267). Convincingly yet tactfully, Marise declares, “’I wouldn’t want gratitude from

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a man...from my husband, Chris. I’d want something much wilder“ (267). Marise
weds Nicholas Campbell and Phebe weds Christopher Cary all grew up in the
same neighborhood. Both Campbell and Cary are doctors and their wives
support them—financially. Feeling a bit emasculated and remembering that she
always loved him, Campbell invites Phebe to New York for a tryst and, in most
un-Cinderella like behavior, she accepts. She notices that “he was...wearing her
favorite, a dark blue suit, but of much better cut and quality than she’d ever seen
on him“ (308). She compliments him on his refined manner of dress believing
that his practice must be flourishing. He admits:
“All this comes from Marise. I wanted to live on my eamings...it
was bad enough to be living in her house but I didn’t feel I could
take her away from all that comfort, especially since it would be
years before I could make it up to her. But in every other respect, I
would prefer to make my own way, which wouldn’t mean a suit like
this, I can tell you, or a Pierce Arrow either. I’m just a poor
struggling doctor, Phebe, and if my income let me run to a Ford and
a couple of suits off One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, I’d be
grateful....But you can’t be married to the hit of theatrical New York
and look like a hick...or so Marisa tells me!“ (308).
Nicholas lives off the riches of Marise. By the time Phebe weds Cary his once
upper middle-class family is bankrupt. She reassures Cary that she has known
poverty all her life and invites the Cary family to come live in her house. In a

house of five adults “Phebe and Christopher were the wage earners“ (302).

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Fauset’s women who work themselves up the economic ladder must decide if
they are willing to support husbands, the lifestyle of husbands and their families.
In addition to providing financial support to their husbands and families,
Fauset’s female characters can be rather provocative. As mentioned previously,
married Phebe Grant Cary accepted an offer to meet Nicholas in New York. At
one point “all she knew was that at last she was crushed close in his arms,
feeling his hot kisses, sensing the ardor of which she had once dreamed“ (309).
This is not the type of behavior one expects from a woman who aspired to
membership in the cult of true womanhood. Phebe, like Marisa, is a woman with
desires and one who makes her own decisions. She tells Nicholas:
“I’ve got to go home.“ But even as she spoke she had a vision of
that home...har ailing father-in-law, her tired and sullen mother, her
weary, apathetic husband. And last of all Olivia [mother-in-law] with
her infuriating, selfish silliness....ln a sudden gust of repulsion, she
sagged against his shoulder....l-le could actually feel her
weakening; her moral strength ebbing with her physical (310).
Phebe’s actions are in line with what the 19203 blues woman sang about She
agrees to meet and consummate their affair. She tells herself “’I have a right to
some happiness...lt’s not my fault if I have to take it where I find it'“ (311).
Though married, she admits to being unhappy. Arriving at the appointed
location, Phebe leaves the cab and as she pays her fare she noticed another

woman exiting a cab in front of hers:

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A colored woman, beautifully dressed, dismounted, looked
searchingly at the house, glanced sharply up and down the street
and darted into the open doorway. Wlth her suddenly quickened
senses, Phebe recognized her for what she was. ..a woman

keeping an assignation with her Iover...a woman like herself (311).

In this scene Phebe is reserving judgment and observing the trepidation of an

unnamed woman. The casualness in the description of this scene also suggests

that women who had affairs were not cheap, unconcerned and unattractive.

Phebe than acknowledges “if he had ever truly loved her he would not be asking

her now to betray Christopher“ (312). In New York few stop to pass moral

judgment; consequently, it is up to Phebe to question herself if she believes that

she is being immoral. Further, Phebe sees herself in the unnamed women which

causes her to pause before consummating in the affair. Nevertheless, Phebe

who spent most of her life expecting to marry Nicholas only to be rejected

surrnises:

Nicholas had married Marisa...he was complaining about Marisa...
he was even now planning to betray Marisa. But he was remaining
with her! Why? Because he had always loved her, wanted her,
held himself in readiness for her back, her call. She, Phebe had
offered him the steadfastness, the loyalty of years. Marisa had
dallbd, had flouted him, had parrnitted herself an array of suitors,
trying them discarding them, encouraging them. And finally she

had chosen Nicholas... and he had jumped to her bidding, made

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himself her thrall, hugging, even while complaining of his chains.
When he could so easily have walked away!

My what was she doing here in this hateful street about to
enter this house, to take a lover, when at home her husband was
awaiting her responsible, uncomplaining, loyal! ...She tumad and
walked as fast as her feet could carry her (312-313).

Phebe is a fully fleshed character. She sees Nicholas as a cuckold dancing to
the tune of his worldly wife Marisa. Marisa, on the other hand, is a woman who is
allowed to sample all that life has to offer without penalty of societal rebuff.
Moreover, she has a husband who will stand by her because he loves and has
always loved her. Finally, Phebe harbors no "I will toward Marisa or vice versa
because in Fauset’s novels the community creates a strong bond with
relationships that sustain throughout the years. In Them le Coeeleiee Maggie
weds Henderson Neal, a former boarder, almost forty-years her senior who
appears to have money. He takes her away from the community, reveals himself
to be a gambler, eventually stabs Maggie in a jealous raga. During her recovery,
he throws himself in front of a subway train. Maggie, eventually, ratums to the
community, is confident in her abilities and succeeds in her own business without
a husband.

In Comeey Amerieen Style, the woman speak and make decisions for
themselves and their families, albeit not always well thought out. Olivia Cary only
wants the best for herself and her preferred family members. For a while she is

stimulated by a lifestyle she manipulates and enjoys. She wants to pass for

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white but is forced into a masquerade—interacting with other Negroes who
recognize she and her family as colored. However, hurtful decisions ultimately
cause her to lose what is Iefl of her family. Although Olivia is forced into
masquerade she intends to train her children to the fine art of passing; alas, her
daughter, Teresa, only succeeds to a marginal level of masquerade.
Overshadowed by her mother’s heavy-handed influence, Teresa fails to develop
a voice for herself and is subject to a loveless marriage, abuse and obscurity.
Fauset’s most tragic maternal figure is Olivia Cary in W
glib Olivia is preoccupied with passing for white and forcing her daughter to
stay away from obviously colored people. Olivia’s obsession appears so
ridiculous it is humorous in parts. She fails to develop a marketable skill and
instead marries well. Her conniving behavior produces a daughter, Teresa, who
is tedious, absurd, boring and tragic. As a child, when Teresa brings little Phebe
and Maria (later knows as Marisa) home from school Olivia tries to shoo colored
Maria away from their home and Teresa’s life. Sent to an exclusive boarding
school, Teresa finds the only person of color and spends her vacation with Alicia
and her family. Consequently, she meets and becomes engaged, secretly, to the
bronze skinned Henry Bates. Petrified at the response of her mother to her
engagement, Teresa asks proud Henry, “’your Spanish, you know. Couldn’t you
use it most of the time and ...and pass for a Mexican?" (143). Before leaving
Teresa’s life for good, Henry confronts mother and daughter axclaiming, “’Are
you crazy, both of you? I’m perfectly satisfied to be an American Negro, tough

as it all is... What am I going to do, throw aside all my traditions, all my friends

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and be a damned gringo just to satisfy the vanity of two make-believe white
womenl...“ (143). Teresa is so inept at passing and Olivia is so enraged by
Teresa’s attempt to wed that she takes her to France where she selects an
abusive, grasping, working-class mama's boy, to be her daughter’s white
husband. Teresa who comes from a privileged background is denied a prince, a
duke, a count and even a jester, who at least worked inside the castle. Aristide,
Teresa’s husband, is a racist who recognizes her as an object of exchange.
When she discovers this “she did not know what to make of her life“ (183).
Without family, community and hope, “gradually her expectation of a change died
away and she settled down into an existence that was colorless, bleak and futile“
(183). Though Teresa comes from a financially successful background she
never exercised her voice, cultivated education or independence nor tried to
improve herself; therefore, in Fauset‘s fictional world Teresa was primed for
failure.

Olivia is obsessive and probably one of the most despicable mother
characters of the Harlem Renaissance literature. Fauset demonstrates that
feminine evil is not reserved for step-mothers. She unapologetically contributes
to her youngest son’s (Oliver) suicide. She had several reasons for marrying
Christopher Cary Sr., none of which involve romance or love for him: “...it was
important for one’s husband to belong to such or such a class. She knew now
that it was highly unlikely that she would meet with and marry a white man of
Cary’s education, standing and popularity. Certainly not in this section of the

country where her affiliations could be so easily traceable“ (28). Since Dr. Cary’s

194

complexion was pale, Olivia approximates “They would have white children...And
for that reason and no other she married Christopher Cary“ (29). Furthermore as
a mother of children from an influential background, the calculating Olivia thinks
“...to what heights might not their children attain? And she as dowagar would
share all their triumphs, their opportunities, their advantages“ (29). Olivia is so
diabolical that she is comical. After she prevents Teresa’s marriage to Henry (an
obvious Negro) Olivia “. . . realized only two things ...first that Teresa was not to
be trusted; secondly that she must make her tactics less obvious“ (152). In
addition to having Oliver, her youngest son, pretending to be her servant she
also wanted him to slick his hair so that he could appear to be “Japanese or
Mexican“ (101). Olivia preferred not to have Negroid looking individuals on her
premises. Part of the tragedy of Olivia Cary is the self-hatred that she passed on
to her daughter and youngest son. For women who believed they were being
snubbed by women like Olivia, Fauset offers a woman to be pitted, a tragic
character. Fauset goes further to warn mature daughters of such mothers to
continue to be respectful but to claim responsibly for their own happiness. In
Fauset’s novelistic world when a young woman does not accept responsibility for
any aspect of her life she falls.

Fauset’s novels make it clear that for aspiring young women one did not,
as Miss Graves observers, “simply stumble into success“ (Ieere Is Confueion
51). Fauset’s novelistic women succeed with the help of others. Most of her
novels indicate that the financial, physical or verbal support of women and the

nurturing of men can enable other women to succeed with minimal

195

complications. In Ieere le Cen1u_eion Mr. Joel Marshall nurtures his daughter
Joanna and Maggie Ellersley. In Plum Bun, Mr. Junius Murray nurtures his
daughters, Angela and Vlrginia, only Virginia responded. Denied a father’s
nurturing, Laurentine receives it in while in her twenties from a suitor, Dr.
Stephen Denleigh. Dr. Cary senior nurtures his family when he is available.
Teresa, for the most part, loves but has little access to her busy father.

Finally, when one of her female protagonists or antagonist characters
stumble if they accept sisterhood there will be redemption. Plem Ben is tale in
support sisterhood both biologically and otherwise. However, young Angela was
bd astray by, Mattie’s, her mother’s game of passing. The game was played
when they were separated from the tanned husbandlfather and daughter/sister.
Angela is in a struggle to discover who she is while seeking the good life exiled
from those who know and love her. Once she is finally finished with Roger,
Sylvander asserts, “Her recognition and rejection of thorough-going sex-role
games has increased Angela’s understanding of herself, of men, and of
marriage“ (182). When she decides to support Miss Powell, Angela thinks “A
whim of fate had set their paths far apart but just the same they were more than
‘sisters under the skin.’ They were really closely connected in blood, in racial
condition, in common suffering“ (340-341). Angela who rejected and exiled
herself from her family and community reclaims and reenters her part in the
community and the sisterhood in a very public way. She reveals to reporters “’I
mean that if Miss Powell isn’t wanted, I’m not wanted either. You imply that she’s

not wanted because she’s coloured. Well, I’m coloured too’“ (347). In IbereJe

196

Conf_u_eion Joanna Marshall discovers “...it was woman who had the real
difficulties to overcome, disabilities of sex and of tradition“ (234). The
romantically tormented Maggie Ellersley reveals to her love, “’I’ve decided to not
marry—anyone. I think I want to try life on my own’“ (261). As a result:
Her new-found independence was a source of the greatest joy.
...When she returned to America she would start her hair work
again, she would inaugurate a chain of Beauty Shops...And she
would gather about her, friends, simple kindly people whom she
liked for themselves: who would seek her company with no thought
of patronage. She would stand on her two feet, Maggie Ellersley,
serenca, independent, self-reliant. The idea exalted her and she
went about her work the picture of optimism and happiness (261-
262)
Maggie could appreciate a real friend not a filend who holds social standing.
Further, her work will place her in a community of women. Although the small
community of Red Brook alienated the Strange women, they came together to
prevent the uninformed Melissa from manying her, equally clueless, half-brother
Malory. Fauset’s successful women characters thrive because they are willing to
confront situations, aspire to self-assigned goals, and recognize the importance
of others and community.
Some critics generally view Fauset's literary women as they view her, well
mannered. Tactfully, Fauset constructs female protagonists who simultaneously

maintained family relationships while developing within chosen professions.

197

Although her female protagonists appear gracious and cultivated they sneer at
conventions and exhibit brash behavior. Their thoughts as well as their lives
were not shrines to saintliness and bourgeois standards of behavior. However,
all her young women wanted to live well. Overall her mothers are scandalous
and less than nurturing. Surpassing the antics of any evil step-mother in folk
tales, Fauset’s Olivia Cary in Comeg American syle is the archetype evil
mother—diabolical, cruel, and malicious to her children. Mothers who are
members of the working-poor do not have time to spend with their children and
therefore allow them the freedom to explore the possibilities of their
neighborhoods. In a hypocritical world, Fauset’s novels offered a variety of

female characters and women’s voices who deserve more research.

198

Notes

 

1 Cinderella was a hardy heroine of whom stories existed in many countries. According
to: Jane Yolen, “America’s ‘Cinderella,’“ MW eds. Laurence
Behrens and :Leonard J. Rosen, (Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1988), as American
publishing grew in the nineteenth century children’s books were produced with bright colors and
“bowdlarized folk tales emerged... Endings were changed, innards cleaned up, and good
triumphed with very loud huzzahs. Cinderella is the weepy, sentimentalizcd pretty girl incapable
of helping herself' (572).

199

Conclusion

LAST WORD

The women in this study, because of their race, class and gender
experienced the world in specific ways. Ways that some American literary
scholars for many years overlooked, excused, ignored or stereotyped.
Nineteenth—century African American narrative women’s voices articulate
rebellion against terrorism and oppression, offer advice, instruction and
inspiration to others, and they remember family and community members often
while being described as sassy by those who choose to ignore their words/acts.
Blassingame advises historians that abolitionist editors were biased and one had
to find a way to separate their agendas from the message of the formerly
enslaved (“Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves’” 82). Moreover, I believe that
many narrative women were aware of and attempted to navigate the biases of
their ghost writers and a public and persevered to tell their stories by managing
what Mattie Jackson refers to as their “secrets.“ Because they were women and
their voices did not conform to the conventions of many masculine escape slave
narratives, and their voices and behaviors were so assertive, their stories went
out of print. In “’I Was Bom’“ James Olney points out that to a greater extent in
men’s narratives Black women are victims of “a cruel master, mistress, or
overseer“ in which the narrator details a savage whipping or subsequent beatings

(153). Clearly, the men articulated their concerns and what they viewed as the

200

violent burdens enslaved women were forced to endure. The women’s act of
confronting or discussing subjugation as well as conversing is often referred to as
sass. In the formerly enslaved women’s narratives, included in this paper,
woman are obligated to confront violence and terrorism with their voices
(characterized as sass) which simultaneously provides them with psychological
and physical relief.

In selecting voice as an aspect of inquiry I wanted to reinforce and
reemphasize the importance of orality and language for African American
women. As literary instruments, the early writings of Black women were often
denied and neglected. The denial or limited recognition that the women received
is a familiar refrain experienced by many women who were characterized as
sassy. Women characterized as sassy understood its dismissive clamor as
others attempted to silence or deny an unexpected and unwanted voice. Karla F.
C. Holloway finds that “Black women writers seem to concentrate on shared
ways of saying, [while] black males concentrate on individual ways of behaving“
(Mooring 8 Metaeeeg 7). She also maintains that there is “a collective ‘spaaking
out” by all the voices gathered within the text, authorial, narrative, characters, and
even the implicated reader, is the responsive strategy in black women’s
literature“ (11). The actions of the narrative women are so straightforward
(sassy) that often their oppressors and critics are stunned and prefer not to
directly acknowledge their voices. In detailing events, the women’s sass achieve
its intended purposes—levels of freedom and a self-imposed exercise of

independence. Sass is spontaneous, timely and insightful. However many

201

r

literary critics, it appears, found the nineteenth—century African American
narrative women stories unappealing which is why many of their narratives
remained obscured until the 19803. They were later taken up by those who
wanted to testify to and recognized the value of their voices and work.

Pauline Hopkins sidestepped the pressure of dealing with publishers. As
part of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company she was able to make her
serialized novels part of the W and W
a novel published by the co-operativa. Co-oparative publishing allowed Hopkins
to express her creative side in a less restrictive way than Fauset.

Sass is generally an unwelcomed coherent verbal act perforrnad by those
believed to have limited power. In intimate relationships sassy women are
dismissed for being unpleasant, loud and having negative attitudes. In the
literary realm, conceivably, critics could attempt to control how others hear sassy
voices. As a woman and as an intellectual novelist Fauset is sassy. As a
storyteller she assumes a public space where she controls stories that testify to
the unified desire and challenge for women to succeed. Simultaneously, while
demonstrating the options available to women, Fauset manages to show the
diversity of woman’s abilities and dreams while confronting a less than receptive
sociopolitical culture in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and
into its early decades. Fauset’s female characters speak with authority, demand
respect on their own terms, and defy stereotypes associated with women of the
time. Like her characters, it is Fauset’s tenacity and persistence that caused her

much misunderstood novels to be published.

202

Aware of how the ruling public perceived their voices, writers like Pauline
Hopkins demonstrated confidence and pride using characters who speak
Plantation Creole without being minstrels and, moreover, can be the heroine in a
novel, Hagar’s Daughter. Inequity, class difference, prejudice and racism
become clear when Venus Johnson alternates between Plantation Creole and
standard English and when Henny, her grandmother, takes the stand to testify.
Likewise in Hagar’s Qeeghter, race, class, gender and public voice are significant
elements in who will be believed and who has the right to speak in public. When
Hagar learns of her African heritage she becomes sassy. However, when she
decides to forget she is Hagar, an escaped slave, she looses her sass, daughter,
memory and identity. Hopkins demonstrates that although all have the right to
speak, certain speech is more acceptable from the lips of particular individuals.

Fauset’s novelistic voice and the voices of her female characters are
obscured largely because critics want to see her as prim, proper and middle-
class. Nevertheless, her novels consistently encourage the young daughters of
working-class women to become entrepreneurs or artists, to satisfy their desires
and live the lives of their dreams. She stresses the multiple challenges that
Negro women faced, showing that some women possessed unpleasant
personalities and proclivities. Her novels clearly, indicate happily ever after did
not always follow after marriage. Additionally, Fauset is also concerned with how
Negro women are portrayed in history. She reminds the public of family
histories, disputes, lifestyles, languages and that women achieved their goals,

faced detractors as they confronted conventions of the time.

203

My focus on African American women’s narrative voice and its reception
embodies a tradition and response that continues to this today. This study finds
that the voices of many early Negro female characters are part of a larger meta-
narrative where women tell their stories and what they say is neglected or their
salient points disregarded creating a critical silence that needs to be filled. The
voices of African American women in nineteenth and early to mid twentieth
century literature need to be heard. This study demonstrates the marginalization
of the voices of African American women, specifically, in literature. Previously,
many critics and historians, it appears, found the voices of African American
women offensive, unimportant, incoherent, or bafl'ling; therefore they were
ignored, silenced and neglected. I hope others will reevaluate the voices of
Negro women characters, particularly in the writings of Black women writers, who

were previously stereotyped, dismissed or overlooked.

204

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205

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